THE FRIENDS BRITAIN'S POST-WAR SECRET INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96B01172R000100060001-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 216
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 15, 2005
• Sequence Number: 1
• Content Type: REPORT

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THE. FRIENDS
Britain's Post-War
Secret Intelligence Operations
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Nigel West
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THE FRIENDS
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Also by Nigel West
Spy! (with Richard Deacon)
MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-45
A Matter of Trust: MIS 1945-72
M16: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909-45
Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War
GARBO (with Juan Pujol)
GCHQ: The Secret Wireless War 1900-86
Molehunt: The Full Story of the Soviet Spy in M15
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THE FRIENDS
Britain's Post-War
Secret Intelligence Operations
Nigel West
WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON
London
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Copyright ?Westintel Research Ltd 1988
First published in Great Britain by
George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited
91 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7TA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
' be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any Eorm or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior consent of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
West, Nigel
T{tt ~-iends Britains Yost-war secret
inttlGgence operations
1. British intelligence services. MI6,
1945-1986
I. Title
327.1'Z'094I
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Butler ~ Tanner Ltd Frome and London
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'MIb, a department known in the Foreign Office,
politely, but not very sincerely, as the Friends'
The Hon. Monty Woodhouse,
S15 Head of Station Tehran 1951-5,
in Something Ventured
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Contents
Acknowledgements
xi
Abbreviations
Organizational Charts:
Post-War Chiefs of the Secret Intelligence Service
British Intelligence Liaison in Washington
Chairmen of the Joint Intelligence Committee and
Foreign Office Advisers to the CSS
xiii
xv
xvi
xvii
?
Introduction
I
1
Transition
9
Z
The British Control Commission for Germany
19
3
Palestine 1945-8
29
4
Malaya 1948-57
41
5
Kim Philby and VALUABLE
SI
6
Cyprus 1955-60
69
7
Buster Crabb OBE GM RNVR
79
8
Operation BOOT
87
9
Operation STRAGGLE
97
10
The Penkovsky Defection
II8
II
The Blake Catastrophe
I33
12
The Molehunt Era
I4Z
13
The Defector Syndrome
158
Notes
17I
Bibliography
177
Index
I81
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Illustrations
The Olympic Stadium Building in West Berlin where the local S1S station
operated under cover of the British Control Commission for Germany
(author's collection).
All that remains today of the American radar station in Rudow, West Berlin,
where SIS sank the shaft for Operation PRINCE'S tunnel (author's collection).
Colonel Grigori Tokaev, SIS's first important post-war defector (Weidenfeld
Archives).
Colonel Harold Perkins (author's collection).
The bodies of Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, the two SIME NCOs
murdered by the Irgun during the ruthless undercover conflict in Palestine
(Topkam Picture Library).
Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS from 1939 to 1952 (Weidenfeld Archives).
Kim Philby pictured in 1955 after he had been publicly cleared by the
Government of any involvement with the defections of Burgess and Maclean
(The Keystone Collection).
Monty Woodhouse, SIS's Head of Station in Tehran until 1955 (courtesy of
Monty Woodhouse).
Sir John Sinclair, the SIS Chief who took early retirement following the death
of Buster Gabb (author's collection).
Buster Gabb, an accomplished diver whose participation in an authorized SIS
operation led to his mysterious death under a Soviet cruiser in Portsmouth
Harbour in April 1956 (The Keystone Collection).
The entrance to 5/6 Pushkin Sheet, Moscow, where Oleg Penkovsky used a
radiator in the hallway as adead-letter drop (author's collection).
The lamppost on Kutuzovsky Prospekt used by Penkovsky to signal his
Western case officers (authors collection).
The entrance to the Peking Restaurant where Penkovsky kept a rendezvous
with Greville Wynne and fiat spotted a KGB surveillance team (author's
collection).
Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky at their trial in Moscow (The Keystone
Collection).
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Greville Wynne on arrival at Northolt airstrip after being swopped for Konon
Molody, April 1964 (BBC Hulton Picture Library).
George Blake, formerly SIS's Head of Station in Seoul and KGB spy (The
Keystone Collection).
Maurice Oldfield, the counter-intelligence expert and former SIS Chief (The
Keystone Collection).
The old KGB headquarters in Moscow (author's collection).
Oleg Gordievsky, once the KGB's Rezident in London who spied for SIS for
twelve years (Associated Press).
The British Embassy in Moscow where Oleg Gordievsky was smuggled out
of Russia (author's collection).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to the independent research undertaken by John Miller
and Charlie Brown. I am also grateful to the staff of the Foreign Office Library,
the Public Records Office, and Admiral W. A. Higgins of the Ministry of
Defence's D Notice Committee for his guidance.
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Abbreviations
AIOC Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
ANA Arab News Agency
ASIS Australian Secret Intelligence Service
BCCG British Control Commission for Germany
BfV West German Internal Security Service
BSC British Security Co-ordination
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CICB Combined Intelligence Co-ordination Bureau
CID Criminal Investigation Department
CIFE Combined Intelligence Far East
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CRPO Combined Research and Planning Office
CSS Chief of MI6
DSO Defence Security Officer
EOKA National Organization of Cypriot Combatants
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters
GRU Soviet Military Intelligence
IRD Information Research Department
ISLD Inter-Services Liaison Department
JIB Joint Intelligence Bureau
JIC Joint Intelligence Committee
KGB Soviet Intelligence Service
MCP Malayan Communist Party
MI5 British Security Service
MI6 British Secret Intelligence Service
NID Naval Intelligence Division
NKVD Soviet Intelligence Service
OPC Office of Policy Co-ordination
SCIU Special Counter-Intelligence Unit
SDECE French Overseas Secret Intelligence Service
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SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
SIFE Security Intelligence Far East
SIME Security Intelligence Middle East
SIS Secret Intelligence Service
SLO Security Liaison OKicer
SOE Special Operations Executive
UB Polish Intelligence Bureau
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Organizational Charts
Post-War Chiefs of the Secret Intelligence Service
Sir Stewart Menzies 1939-52
Sir John Sinclair 1952~i
Sir Dick White 1956-68
Sir John Rennie 1968-73
Sir Maurice Oldfield 1973-8
Sir Dickie Franks 1978-81
Sir Colin Figures 1981-5
Sir Christopher Curwen 1985-
?
British Intelligence Liaison in Washington
M16
Peter Dwyer 1945-9
Kim Philby 1949-5I
Machlachlan Silverwood-Cope 1951-2
John Bruce Lockhart 1951-3
Leslie Mitchell 1953-6
Machlachlan Silverwood-Cope 1956-8
John Briance 1958-60
Maurice Oldfield 1960-64
Christopher Phillpotts 1964-6
Stephen de Mowbray 1966-8
Christopher Curwen 1968-71
Dick Thistlethwaite 1945-9
Geoffrey Paterson 1949-54
Harry Stone 1954-64
Michael McCain 1964-9
Bang Russell Jones 1969-72
Cecil Shipp 1972-5
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Organizational Charts xvi
Chairmen of the Joint Intelligence Committee
Victor Cavendish-Bentinck
1939-45
Harold Caccia
1945-8
William Hayter
1948-9
Patrick Reilly
1950-53
Patrick Dean
1953-60
Hugh Stevenson
1960-63
Bernard Burrows
1963-6
Denis Greenhill
1966-8
Edward Peck
1968-70
Stewart Crawford
1970-73
Geoffrey Arthur
1973-5
Antony Duff
1975-9
Antony Acland
1979-82
Patrick Wright
1982-4
Foreign Office Advisers to the CSS
George Glutton
1952-5
Michael Williams
?
1955-6
Geoffrey McDermott
1956-8
Robin Hooper
1958-60
Peter Wilkinson
1960-63
Geoffrey Arthur
1963-6
Christopher Swart-Biggs
1966-70
Kenneth Ritchie
1970-73
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Introduction
The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) has been in continuous existence,
under various guises, since its inception on 1 October 1909. Originally it was
designated the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, but during the
First World War it adopted the military intelligence cover of MI I{c). Thereafter
it became known as MI6, and that title has stuck, albeit unofficially, to the
present day. To insiders it has always been known as 'the fiml' or, by the less
respectful, 'the racket'. In more recent years initiated outsiders, mostly Foreign
Office regulars and business contacts, have referred to the organization simply
as 'the Friends'. This popular euphemism has extended to SIS's advice, which
is often described as having come 'from friendly circles'.
Today, as before?the Second World War, it is officially denied that SIS has
a peacetime existence. Of course, this subterfuge fools no one, but it does
enable government ministers to avoid awkward Parliamentary Questions and
allow British Foreign Service officers to disavow the organization which, by
its intrinsic nature, is distinctly undiplomatic and is not infrequently the cause
of an embarrassing nunpus. In short, although the ruse of SIS's lack of
acknowledgement appears a trifle anachronistic, while the initials of its Amer-
icanand Soviet counterparts, the CIA and the KGB, are universally recognized,
it does serve a practical purpose.
Because SIS has no offidal peacetime existence it follows that there are,
therefore, no documents or records to be placed in the Public Records Office,
as is required by law of most government departments. And since there are
no files, none can be declassified after the elapse of the appropriate period of
time. Indeed, almost the only SIS documents ever known to have slipped past
the ever-vigilant 'weeders', who scrutinize everything before it is shipped to
the Public Records Office at Kew, is a batch of pre-war administrative Eiles
relating to the Passport Control Office.l This now defunct department operated
for several decades as SIS's main cover, thus allowing intelligence officers to
be posted abroad as Passport Control Officers. Clearly the deception, although
well known to Britain s enemies, was sufficiently effective to distract at least
one of the ubiquitous 'weeders'.
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SIS's lack of an official entity or form is supported by a blanket ban on
public disclosures from its employees and a permanent embargo on the release
of personal memoirs. In contrast, no less than eight former members have
produced accounts of their work in the Security Service. Sir John Mastennan,
Sir Percy Sillitoe, Derek Tangye, Lord Rothschild, Stephen Watts and, most
recently, Peter Wright have all had their autobiographies published.Z Sir
Gerald Glover even had his printed privately,' while the late Jack Morton's
recollections on a career that continued until 1971 is still in manuscript form.
The Cabinet Office has also officially allowed another MI5 officer, Anthony
Simkins, who was Deputy Director-General between 1965 and 1971, to have
his collaboration in the preparation of the final volume of British Intelligence in
the Second World War4 acknowledged. He was also commissioned, with Pro-
fessor Sir Harry Hinsley, to compile Security and Counter-Intelligence,5 a wartime
history of the Security Service.
SIS, on the other hand, is rather more strict in its approach to this sensitive
issue, and the amount of printed material available from those with First-hand
experience of SIS's operations is sufficiently limited to be listed here in full.
The first person to make the attempt was (Sir) Compton Mackenzie, who
tried to give a highly detailed account of his experiences of his tour of duty
for MII(c) in the Eastern Mediterranean during the First World War. All
copies of Greek Memories? were seized on publication day and the author was
convicted of breaching the Official Secrets Act. He was fined ?100 with f100
costs, no mean figure in 1931, and all the books were ordered to be destroyed.
Only a few valuable first editions survive, including one in the British Library
which still cannot be read without MI5's permission!
Two years later another MI1(c) veteran, Captain Henry Landau, avoided a
similar prosecution by releasing All's Fair, the first of his three volumes of
memoirs, in New York They were never brought out in England and, as the
author was a South African living in America, there was little the British
authorities could do to prevent him.
During the post-war era only a handful of reminiscences have got through
the net. The first to break ranks was Leslie Nicholson, who had long since
retired from SIS and in 1966, persuaded a New York publisher to issue British
Agent. As a precaution Nicholson concealed his identity under the pseudonym
John Whitwell. Having already emigrated to America, like Landau, the author
kept out of the jurisdiction of the British courts and thus escaped being
prosecuted or injuncted. When an edition was published the following year in
London, the Government, presented with a fait accompli, took no action. It had
also received advance warning that Kim Philby, having defected to Moscow
four years earlier, had held an auction for the rights to My Silent War. Once
again, no attempt was made to prevent publication in England.
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With these precedents having been established, there was only official
disapproval for Fred Winterbotham, a wartime SIS officer who wrote The
Ultra Secret in 1974, and Professor R. V. Jones, SIS's wartime scientific adviser
who produced Most Secret War in 1978. Similar defiance was demonstrated
by Philip Johns, another emigrant to the United States who in 1979 wrote
Within Two Cloaks, his recollections as SIS's Head of Station in wartime
Lisbon.
Passing reference to their wartime service in SIS has been made by literary
figures like Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, A. J.
Ayer and Hugh Trevor Roper, but none have risked going into matters in any
depth. Other books by retired SIS officers with a peacetime contribution
behind them, such as Nigel Clive, John Bruce Lockhart and David Cornwell
(rather better known by his nom de plume John le Came), have discreetly
omitted mention of anything other than their cover roles as regular diplomats
from their autobiographical details.
When Charles Ransom joined the team of Professor Hinsley's academics
preparing the offiaal history of British intelligence for the Cabinet Office, his
twenty-year career in SIS was referred to simply as having been'in the Foreign
Service, 1946--66'; in fact, he had joined the Friends in 1946 and had served
abroad only once, heading the Rome Station from 1958 to 1961.
The unique exception is Monty Woodhouse, who succeeded in writing
Something Ventured without official interference. This Fascinating book describes
his activities as SIS's Head of Station in Tehran and his efforts to have Dr
Mussadeq removed from power, after which he left the Friends and was elected
the Conservative Member of Parliament for Oxford.
More recently, two others, Anthony Cavendish, who was based in Germany
after the wAr, and Desmond Bristow, latterly SIS's Head of Station in Madrid,
have received stem warnings to discourage them from putting pen to paper.
Daunting legal obstacles were placed in the path of the formers Inside /ntel-
ligence, so the author chose to have his book printed and distributed privately.
Bristow has yet to complete his project.
The Friends are determined to prevent those seeking to capitalize on their
secret careers and, when compared to the Security Service, have been quite
effective in discouraging disclosures. Because of its structure of watertight
compartments and the strict use of the 'need to know' rule, only a handful of
senior SIS officers have ever been in a position to give anything like a
comprehensive overview of its operations, even though the organization is
itself, in number, a tiny fraction of the CIA, the KGB or even the French
DGSE.
Even when individual agents run by SIS case officers have decided to
reveal their handiwork, very little of substance about the Friends has been
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q The Friends
Forthcoming. Only a few over-embroidered books have been published, the
most recent being Break-In by Bill Graham,' the story of a contractor and part-
time SIS agent who spent two years inside the Soviet trade delegation in
London Fitting double-glazed windows while simultaneously accumulating
useful order-of-battle data about Soviet personnel. Freelancers like Graham,
hired for one-off operations, can only give a small snapshot of the organization
and are never allowed to gain enough information to paint a complete picture.
Where information can be traced directly to a particular insider, the Crown
has the choice of wielding some awesome weapons: a criminal prosecution
under the Official Secrets Act, which governments sometimes find politically
uncomfortable, or the civil remedy of bringing a suit alleging breach of
confidence. Unlike the Official Secrets altemative, the latter can be undertaken
virtually anywhere and can be prohibitively costly to defend. Both merits were
demonstrated recently in the Australian courts when the British Government
tried to suppress the publication of Peter Wright's illicit memoirs, Spycatcher.
That particular controversy achieved two unexpected goals, one foe either
side. The Defence got aworld-wide bestseller, but the Plaintiffs showed the
lengths they were prepared to go, regardless of cost or unpopularity, to impose
silence on the Crown`s secret servants.
The introduction of a publications review board along the lines operated
by the CIA and FBI seems an attractive altemative to the present system for
all concemed (apart from the lawyers), be they taxpayer, historians, frustrated
memoirists or even those directly concemed with maintaining the nation's
security. However, not even the most optimistic members of the intelligence
establishment anticipate such an event for some years. One consequence is
that histories like this one are bound to be incomplete, quite apart Erom the
excisions made voluntarily after requests from 'the relevant authorities'.
This account is not intended as a work of disclosure in the sense that the
pages are filled with revelations of appalling wrong-doing, although some
episodes, such as the ruthless sabotage campaign conducted by Harold Perkins
from SIS's Rome Station against the Palestinian refugee ships in 1946, are
hard to justify. Nor is it a whitewash. It is instead intended to be a factual
account of Britain s efforts in the field of secret intelligence during the decades
following the end of the war. No names of living agents are compromised
and no secret sources in current use placed in jeopardy. But it is a nuts-and-
bolts description of how the country's overseas, clandestine intelligence-
gathering arm made the transformation from Empire to membership of the
EEC.
The question most frequently posed nowadays in this context is whether,
post-Empire, and with a vast signals intelligence capability employing many
thousands, Britain really needs a Secret Intelligence Service. In the pages that
?
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follow it will become evident that successive governments of both persuasions
have found SIS's arcane skills indispensable. Certainly, Ernest Bevin and
Anthony Eden made heavy and persistent calls on the organization's resources.
But is there still a requirement? The invasion of the Falklands in I98Z is surely
eloquent testimony of a continuing necessity to acquire, collate and distribute,
in a timely manner, secret information to the right quarters. As had previously
been demonstrated at Pearl Harbor in 1941 (more than a decade and a half
before the creation of the CIA), there had been plenty to indicate an impending
attack if only there had been a properly responsive mechanism to interpret
the signs. The shortcomings of Whitehall's modem intelligence structure
were subsequently investigated by Lord Franks, whose rport? recommended
significant improvements in the chain linking a covert source to the Chairman
of the Joint Intelligence Committee (who, in turn, passes his staff's considered
advice to his political masters), but did not suggest dramatic changes in SIS's
role.
Lord Franks's criticisms centred on what was perceived as a poor per-
formance by the JIC's Assessments Staff when dealing with 'an area of low
priority' like the Falklands before the Argentine invasion. In that instance SIS's
advice never filtered up beyond the Latin America Central Intelligence Group,
the conduit for drawing the JIC's attention to particular issues at its regular
meeting in the Cabinet Office every Wednesday morning. This was one of
the 'defects in the Joint Intelligence machinery' that was subsequently corrected
by breaking the tradition requiring the JIC Chaimlan to be appointed from
the Foreign Office.
The Falklands intelligence lapse confirmed Peter Hennessy's truism that 'the
shortcomings of the JIC and the secret agencies tend only to be exposed after
the kind of failure they exist to prevent :' What made the Franks Report so
remarkable was not just the fact that it went 'considerably further than any
disclosures at the end of the statutory thirty years in the amount of intelligence
material displayed',10 but that so much of it was released for public consump-
tion. Previous post mortems on intelligence mistakes, like the complete absence
of any secret intelligence during the Omani Campaign during the late 1960s,
have ~ never been published. Indeed, Sir Edward Bridges's enquiry into the
Buster Crabb affair in 1956 has never even been admitted as actually having
taken place!
The increased availability in recent years of previously classified documents,
most notably in the United States, has done much to reveal the extent to
which vital foreign policy decisions have been influenced by secret intelligence.
Some have exposed the scale of covert operations mounted by administrations
that only gave consent to them on the basis that the failures could be
repudiated. Thus Dement Attlee's Government authorized a deadly counter-
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terrorist action in Palestine and perpetuated what added up to a virtual guerrilla
war in the Ukraine. Similarly, Eden made astonishing demands on SIS in the
run-up to Suez. As we shall see, SIS not only masterminded the Anglo-French
adventure in the first place, but later conveyed the devastating news that the
Soviets intended to intervene, thus fuming a well stage-managed plot into a
fiasco that wrecked the careers of both (Sir) Patrick Dean (then Chairman of
the JIC) and Michael Williams (SIS's Foreign Office Adviser), to say nothing
of Eden himself.
It is SIS's task to pursue policy objectives by unorthodox means and to
amass useful information from secret (and open) sources. The operation that
goes wrong is an occupational hazard, although it is only accepted as such by
politicians with reluctance. Usually both the triumphs and the disasters are
kept under wraps. The infiltration of well-equipped partisan groups into the
Soviet Union from the Baltic, and the joint Anglo-American sponsored attempt
to undermine Enver Hoxha's regime in Albania, must be counted as failures.
So should SIS's embarrassing endeavour to place a frogman under the Ord-
zhonikidze during Nikita IChrushchev's goodwill visit in 1956. All were to have
profound effects on 'the firm'. Yet there were also the achievements -the
skilful management of Soviet defectors like Colonel Penkovsky and Oleg
Gordievsky; the brilliant 'technical coverage' of Soviet diplomatic premises
during the late 1960s; the elimination of Mussadeq and the manipulation of
Greek policy towards Cyprus during the Emergency in 1955. Indeed, Britain's
painful transition from a colonial power to a European leader with just nine
possessions left scattered around the world might have been a lot more fraught
without the rearguard intelligence battles won behind the scenes.
Finally, for those who may have reservations about the advisability of
telling this story, the reader is reminded that another routine danger of
collecting intelligence is every agency's inevitable susceptibility to hostile
penetration. All realistic case officers now recognize that dealing with emigre
groups is, at best, a chancy affair. At one time they were considered excellent
sources of information about their homeland and useful pools from which to
recruit agents and foment subversion. Unfortunately, experience has shown
that most Eastern Bloc emigre organizations have been hopelessly compro-
mised, if not actually n,rn directly from Moscow. Nor has SIS been immune
to the phenomenon of the mole, the ideollogically motivated convert to the
opposition's cause. Both Philby and George Blake confessed to having betrayed
every secret that ever passed over their desks, which means that what the
KGB did not know about SIS during their periods of employment was
probably not worth knowing. Nor did the damage stop when Blake was
arrested in April I96I or when Philby vanished from Beirut in January 1963.
There is plenty of evidence to show that after their respective escapes, both
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men continued to nullify SIS's activities by exposing its overseas order of
battle, the intelligence officers posted abroad as the organization's front-line.
In essence, there is nothing in the pages that follow that is not already well
known to the KGB and its many surrogates.
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Transition
'Deception has undeniably a part to play in diplomacy. In connection with
gathering the intelligence on which to base a sound policy it is often essential,
just as it is in war. But certain rules apply. It must be used selectively or it can
become a bad habit'
Geoffrey McDermott, The Eden Legacy'
At the end of the war in Europe, the British intelligence community consisted of
numerous separate organizations exercising either a security or an intelligence
function, or a combination of both. Some, like Colin Gubbins's Special Oper-
ationsExecutive (SOE), Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart's Political Warfare Executive
(which co-ordinated psychological and propaganda operations) and Lord Sel-
bome's Ministry of Economic Warfare, had no expectation of a peacetime
existence. Their usefulness was judged to have come to an end, and they were
to be dismantled and their personnel demobbed. SOE's task had been to
foment resistance inside enemy-occupied territory and, at the conclusion of
hostilities, had in theory at least, worked itself out of a job. Its very success
had made it redundant. There was, nevertheless, a core of units which were
destined to survive: the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6,
and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which, at this
point, was still under the departmental control of MI6's Chief, known by
convention as the CSS, Chief of the Secret Service; the Security Service, more
widely referred to by its cover military intelligence designation of MI5, under
the leadership of its Director-General, Sir David Petrie; and the three service
intelligence departments of the Air Ministry, the War Office and the Naval
Intelligence Division (NID).
One of the difficulties Eaced by the CSS, Sir Stewart Menzies, upon the
German surrender in 1945 was the new administration's interest in returning
people to their avilian occupations. During the previous five years, special
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~ ~ The Friends
arcane skills had been acquired in such diverse areas as irregular operations
and psychological warfare. Menzies was anxious to retain a capability to
conduct the former, while the Foreign Office recognized a continuing need for
the latter. Accordingly, key officers from SOE, such as Robin Brook and Dickie
Franks, were persuaded to join SIS and continue their clandestine interests. It
was not until 1947, after the Political Warfare Executive had been dismembered,
that its value was realized belatedly; the Government, therefore, reconstituted
it as the Information Research Department (IRD) of the Foreign Office.
Before embarking on a description of SIS's transition from peace to war, it
might be as well to examine the scope of the three principal British intelligence
machines which were themselves then under study, at Winston Churchill's
request, by Sir Findlater Stewart, formerly the Chairman of the recently
disbanded Home Defence Executive. Stewart's secret report, dated 27
November 1945, has never been published, but it was essentially a com-
prehensive survey of British intelligence with recommendations,' based on
evidence submitted by both Menzies and Petrie, for Britain's future intelligence
requirements. By the time Stewart had completed his deliberations, Churchill
had been replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Attlee; but the Cabinet
Secretary was still Sir Edward Bridges, and it was to him that Stewart's report
was delivered. In short, it favoured MI6's continued, covert life, with an added,
limited capacity to undertake clandestine SOE-style operations. The time-
honoured, parallel system, which had so neatly divided the nation's intelligence
and security responsibilities since 1909 between MI5 within the Empire and
SIS elsewhere in the world, was endorsed, although Stewart apparently
suggested the construction of a combined headquarters in London so as to
avoid wasteful duplication. At the time, SIS was still occupying its huge offices
at 54 Broadway, in Victoria, and MI5 had transfenred from St James's Street
to the recently vacated Headquarters London District in Curzon Street. The
idea of combining the two was later dropped, although a convenient location -
the site of some old gasometers in Horsefery Road -was earmarked for the
stillborn project.
Upon the advent of peace, or at least a cold war, SIS settled down to
coping with two challenges: the threat to European independence posed by
Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union, and the organization's own unwieldy
structure.
The war with Germany over, SIS now anticipated a period of struggle to
contain Soviet territorial and political ambitions. The collective brainpower of
its intellectuals - A. J. Ayer, Hugh Seton-Watson, Robert Carew-Hunt and
David Footman - predicted a potential threat of global conflict from the
Comintem's ideological successor, the Cominform. In their work can be found
the recognition of the unpalatable fact that, whatever the cost of the recent
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war, Moscow was just as committed as ever to world revolution. for example,
in 1944 Footman, a distinguished novelist,2 had published Red Prelude, a
biography of Andrei Zhelyabov and the first of several scholarly books on
Russian revolutionary history. Two years later, in The Primrose PaEh, he
documented the life of Ferdinand Lasalle, founder of the German Labour
Movement and a powerful influence on Marx and Engels. Footman was to
comment that Marx
had, he felt, discovered the scientific laws of historical development which
made (world revolutions inevitable. The question was when it was going
to happen. But the final and happy state of affairs that was to follow on
after the proletarian revolution was so desirable that it was obviously
one's duty to hung on the revolution by every possible means.'
Footman's critical analysis was in line with Seton-Watson, who left SIS in
1946 to return to academic life at Oxford. He later wrote Neither War Nor
Peace, The East European Revolution and The Pattern of Communist Resolution,
each a study of the malign influence of totalitarianism. Carew-Hunt sub-
sequently wrote Marxism Past and Present and The Theory and Practice of
Communism, a textbook on modern Marxist philosophy which promised that
'the entire fabric of society is to be fumed upside down'.?
However, in the first uncertain months of peace, SIS's intelligence bureau-
crats were mainly preoccupied by matters of internal politics. That 'the firm'
would contract at the conclusion of hostilities was to be expected. Most SIS
members were only too anxious to get back to civilian life, where many had
jobs waiting. SIS's greatest wartime expansion had taken place within Section
V, aself-contained counter-intelligence adjunct whose sole function was the
assessment and exploitation of intercepted Axis wireless signals. Since 1940,
more than 450 specialists had been drafted into Section V, the London base
of which was housed in Ryder Street, but the collapse of the Nazi regime had
terminated their mission. As the Sicherheitsdienst's radio stations went off the
air, and once the much vaunted 'Werewolf' guerrilla movement was evidently
not. going to materialize, there was little reason for Section V to continue its
operations. The head of Section V, Felix Cowgill, certainly saw the writing on
the wall and took up anon-intelligence job with the military government in
Munchen-Gladbach. The rest of the service prepared itself for a structural
reorganization which would reflect the change in priorities brought about by
peace.
SIS's Broadway headquarters was essentially split into two halves: the SIS
stations which were scattered around the globe and accommodated under
diplomatic or military cover in missions overseas, and the ten 'consumer'
headquarters sections. In brief, the individual stations gathered information
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~ 2 The Friends
which the London sections collated, analysed and then distributed to the right
quarters. Each section had a special responsibility for liaising with SIS's clients,
the external services and government departments in need of a supply of
secret intelligence. Thus Section I handled political matters, II the military, III
the Royal Navy, I V the Air Ministry, Vcounter-intelligence, V I economic,
VII financial, IX Soviet and X the press. Section VIII dealt with SIS's complex
communications and provided a link with GCHQ.
The hierarchy at Broadway was headed by the CSS, Sir Stewart Menzies,
who had his own small department consisting of his Staff Officer (known as the
CSO/CSS), Peter Koch de Gooreynd, who liaised with the Chiefs of Staff
and the Joint Intelligence Committee, and his Foreign Office Adviser, Robert
Cecil.
Menzies had three Deputy Directors, each nominated by their respective
services: John Cordeaux for the nary, Air Commodore Lionel Payne for the
Air Ministry and Major-General William Beddington for the army. In addition,
he had both aVice-Chief, Major-General John Sinclair, and a Deputy Chief, Air
Commodore (Sir) James Easton. Cordeaux had reached the rank of lieutenant-
colonel in the Royal Marines before his posting to naval intelligence in 1938,
and had switched to SIS in 1942. 'Lousy' Payne, who had won the Air Force
Cross in 1919, when he was twenty-five, was soon to leave SIS to become
the air correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Beddington, anEton- and Oxford-
educated veteran of the First World War who had seen action at Gallipoli,
was to retire to his country home in Northamptonshire in 1947 and devote
himself to hunting foxes. 'Sinbad' Sinclair, a cricket enthusiast who had started
his career in the navy, had come into SIS early in 1945 after just a year as the
Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office; he was to be appointed
Menzies's successor in I95Z. Easton remained in SIS until 1958, when he was
knighted and given a regular diplomatic post abroad.
During the summer of 1945, Menzies appointed six prominent SIS per-
sonalities, under the chairmanship of Maurice Jeffes, to review the organization
and recommend changes which would make 'the firm' more responsive to the
needs of peacetime intelligence-gathering.
Jeffes had been in SIS since 1919 and had served as Head of Station in both
Paris and New York The other committee members were Christopher Amold-
Forster, Captain Edward Hastings RN, David Footman, John Cordeaux and
Kim Philby. Arnold-Forster, the SIS Chief Staff Officer, was shortly to take
up his pre-war occupation of stockbroking in the City. Hastings, the CSS's
personal representative at GCHQ, had spent much of the war at Bletchley
Park masterminding the administration of the signals intelligence product
codenamed ULTRA. This was to be his last significant contribution to SIS
before his well-earned retirement to his Sussex estate in 1949. Footman, the
?
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long-serving head of Section I, was to stay on with SIS until 1953 when he
moved to St Antony's College, Oxford. Cordeaux was briefly to succeed
Arnold-Forster as CSO, before leaving SIS in 1946. He unsuccessfully con-
tested the Bolsover constituency for the Conservatives in 1950 and 1951, but
was eventually elected to Parliament in 1955 as the MP for Nottingham
Central. Philby, the wartime recruit from SOE, had excelled in counter-
intelligence work and, late the previous year, had been entrusted with the
development of the new, anti-Soviet unit, Section IX. The Committee's sec-
retary was Alurid Denne.
Together these seven officers thrashed out a new, streamlined, internal
order of battle, with 'R' and 'P', requirements and production, sections super-
seding the old arrangements. The first would assess the demand Eor particular
types of information in certain fields, leaving it to the production staff to
acquire it. Section V, the counter-intelligence unit, was abolished along with
Section IX, and RS became exclusively Soviet-orientated, absorbing an area
that had previously been Section IX's parish. This particular recommendation
had been initiated by Philby, who, of course, had his own motives, as he later
admitted in his autobiography. His sole interest had been in 'keeping, for the
time being at any rate, the whole field oEsnti-Soviet and anti-communist work
under my own direct supervision' s RS liaised with the codebreaker at GCHQ
and R9 embraced all scientific intelligence.
The committee's lengthy report on reorganization suggested a simplified
structure of five directorates: finance and administration, production, require-
ments, training and development, and war planning.
The CSS accepted much of the report and appointed Frank Slocum as
his Director of Administration. Slocum had joined SIS from the Royal
Naval Tactical School in 1937 and was to remain at Broadway until 1954,
when he was posted abroad as Head of Station in Oslo. The new Director of
Production (known simply by the abbreviation DP) was Kenneth Cohen, an
old SIS hand who once claimed to have been the only Jew in the Royal
Navy. He had joined SIS in 1935 and subsequently had headed the Vichy
French country section. The Director of Training and Development was John
Munn, formerly the commandant of SOE's training school at Beaulieu in
Hampshire. His new department was established in Princes House, Princes
Street, close to Oxford Circus, with additional facilities at Fort Monckton,
Gosport.
Subordinate to the post of DP were three Controller, who each looked
after the stations in their individual geographical regions. Thus Simon Galienne,
as Controller Western Area, handled France, Spain and North Africa. In
converation and internal correspondence he was simply refen ed to by the
initials CWA. The Controller Northern Area was Harry Carr, who had spent
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SIS's Post-War Reorganization
CSS
(Foreign Office Adviser)
Vice-Chief Deputy Chief
Director of Administration
Director of Training and Development
Director of War Planning
Director of Production
-DPI: Controller Northern Area; P I: Soviet Union, Scandinavia
Controller Western Area; P2: France, Spain, North Africa
Controller Eastern Area; P3: Germany, Austria, Switzerland
-DP2: Controller Middle East; P4: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria, etc.
-DP3: Controller Far East; P5: Latin America, Far East
-DP4: London-based operations
Director of Requirements
-R1: Political
-RZ: Air
-R3: Naval
-R4: Military
-R5: Counter-intelligence
-R6: Economic
-R 7: Financial
-R8: GCHQ
-R9: Scientific
fourteen years as Head of Station in Helsinki before being evacuated to
Stockholm in 1941. The Controller Eastern Area in charge of the key German,
Swiss and Austrian stations was Andrew King, fresh from having spent the
war in Switzerland, latterly as Head of Station in Eieme.
Between the Controllers and the stations was a second management tier of
Production or 'P Officers'. Each P Officer supervised SIS's activities in two or
three countries. Thus the P3, Peter Lunn, son of the veteran skier Arnold Lunn,
supervised SIS operations in Austria and Germany, reporting to his immediate
superior, the CEA.
This pyramid-like system was designed to channel information from agents
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Transition ~ 5
in the field, through local stations, to Broadway. From there it was the task of
the requirements section to circulate information to its numerous clients,
including the Joint Intelligence Committee and a newly created body, the Joint
Intelligence Bureau (jIB). Late in 1945 the JIC's wartime Chairman, Victor
('Bill') Cavendish-Bentinck,? was appointed Ambassador to Warsaw and Harold
(now Lord) Caccia took over the reins. The JIB was headed by Major-General
Kenneth Strong, himself swell-established intelligence officer who had served
as Eisenhower's intelligence chief at the Supreme Headquarters Allied
Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The JIB was intended to be the country's first
attempt to integrate the handling and analysis of all types of intelligence, and
Strong gathered an impressive quantity of skilled analysts from the services
to launch it. He later said that 'the formation of the Bureau represented the
first attempt at the unified handling and objective analysis of intelligence
needed by more than one government department and a first step towards
the integration of intelligence'.' Although he admitted that 'none of my friends
thought that the Bureau would last longer than six months', the organization
was to remain in existence until 1963, when it was swallowed up by the
Defence Intelligence Staff at the Ministry of Defence.
It was SIS's task to supply sufficient secret intelligence for the JIB staff to
prepare their own assessments. Much of this material was to come from agents
run by SIS's global network of stations. The stations themselves, consisting
of a Head of Station, up to a dozen assistants and a small secretarial staff,
provided coverage throughout the world. The tasks of a particular station could
range from providing illicit support to a regime, carrying out reconnaissance
missions in a neighbouring state, recruiting agents to penetrate a hostile target,
or preparing local stay-behind resistance cells in anticipation of an invasion.
Every station had a different set of priorities decided by the relevant Controller.
In a typical station, such as Ankara, the Head of Station would be accredited
at the relevant embassy, legation or consulate as a First or Second Secretary
and would act as a link with the local authorities, from whom he might
occasionally extract 'UA', the abbreviation for unofficial assistance. His role,
of course, would be well known among the rest of the diplomatic mission and
even the expatriate community, which were required to exercise discretion.
The thorny problem of suitable concealment for professional intelligence
officers, which had so dogged SIS before the war when the Foreign Office's
Passport Control Department had provided cover of the most transparent
variety, had been largely overcome. Intelligence-gathering was still regarded
with distaste by some Foreign Service stalwarts, but the war had generally
transformed the hostility of all but the most stubborn. The fact that SIS's
epithet of 'the firm' changed to the more affectionate 'the Friends' is an
indication of the transfom-ation in the regular Diplomatic Service's attitude.
?
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~ 6 The Friends
Yet, in spite of this broad acceptance, the old cover did perpetuate and seems
to have had its advantages. The Passport Control Department survived within
the Foreign Office until 1968, when it was finally merged with the regular
Passport Office. Even more surprisingly, all three of the post-war Directors
of Passport Control, Maurice Jeffes, John Teague and Leslie Mitchell, were really
senior SIS officers. The Passport Control Department also provided Harold
Caccia with a suitably misleading entry in the Diplomatic List, and several
Heads of Station around the world still use 'Visa Officer as their local cover.
In most Allied countries the identity of the Head of Station was well known
to the local intelligence authorities with whom he was expected to develop a
good working relationship. Usually he was not just tolerated, but actively
welcomed and given every opportunity to capitalize on wartime friendships
and favours. He also provided a useful alternative channel for semi-official,
non-diplomatic communications. In some countries, such as the United States,
SIS and MI5 both maintained permanent representatives. During the war, a
combined office called British Security Co-ordination (BSC) had been run from
New York by Sir William Stephenson, encompassing SOE, the Political
Warfare Executive, MI5 and SIS; but the terms of a secret 'no poaching'
Anglo-American security pact required that the BSC be wound up as soon as
the Japanese had surrendered. An interesting feature of the post-war era was
British and American respect for the jealously guarded sovereignty of each
other s territory; SIS agreed not to recruit US citizens in return for an American
undertaking not to conduct covert operations within the Empire without prior
consent.
The removal of Stephenson from New York, however, did not mean the
end of a British intelligence presence in America. In fact, Peter Dwyer, formerly
the SIS Head of Station in Panama, opened an SIS office at the British Embassy
in Washington and ran it until 1949, when he retired to Ottawa. MI5's
Security Liaison Officer (SLO) during the same period was Dick Thistlethwaite.
They were then replaced by Philby and Geoffrey Paterson, respectively.
In Singapore, the situation was a little more complex, as MI5 had its own
intelligence unit there, the Counter-Intelligence Co-ordination Bureau (CICB).
Headed by Colonel Dickie Dixon, the CICB's function was to mop up enemy
stay-behind organizations. It had only a short life because the Japanese had
been very unsuccessful in building up networks of agents. At the end of 1945,
Dixon returned to London, leaving his two deputies, John Harrison and
Courtney Young, MI5's only Japanese-speaker, to build Security Intelligence
Far East. SIFE extended to Borneo, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, Hong Kong,
Rangoon and Australia, where SLOB maintained a link between the local
police Speaal Branches and MI5's overseas branch in London, designated E
Division.
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SIS's parallel system, also based in Singapore, was headed by (Sir) Denys
Page, the Oxford academic who was subsequently appointed Master of Jesus
College, Cambridge. His Who's Who entry modestly recorded his brief role as
'I945-6 Head of a Command Unit, Intelligence Division, HQ South-East
Asia'. His office had outposts in Canberra, Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur, Hong
Kong, Tokyo and Bangkok (and, latterly, Vientiane and Hanoi), and answered
to SIS's Controller Far East, who, until 1950, was Dick Ellis, another old
intelligence hand who had first joined MI6 as an assistant Passport Control
Officer in Berlin in 1924. In 1940, he had been posted to New York as
Stephenson's deputy in BSC. When Malcolm MacDonald, the Govemor-
General of Malaya, was appointed British Commissioner-General in South-
East Asia in 1948, both MI5 and SIS's organizations reported to his local
liaison committee, known as the Joint Intelligence Committee Far East, or
JIC/FE.
The set-up in Singapore, with a joint intelligence apparatus answering to
the local British minister, was similar to the arrangements in the Middle East,
where John Teague maintained a regional headquarters for SIS in Cairo
masquerading as the Combined Research and Planning Office. This cover,
usually known as CRPO (pronounced 'Creepo'), was a translucent successor
to the Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD), which had long been compro-
mised. CRPO operated within the British Middle East Office structure; had
important stations in Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Amman, Basra, Port Said and
Damascus; and worked closely with MI5's rather more overt outfit, Security
Intelligence Middle East (SIME). Headed by Brigadier Douglas Roberts, a
veteran SIS agent who had even worked under commer?al cover as an 'illegal'
in Russia, SIME distributed staff in British territories throughout the Middle
East, working closely with the colonial authorities in Aden, Cyprus, Pale3tine
and the Sudan. They were usually in the guise of Defence Security Officers
(DSOs), but other, more convenient covers.were employed when the occasion
demanded. MI5's man in Iraq, for example, Jack Morton, was seconded as
Civil Assistant on the Staff of the Air Officer Commanding RAF Habbaniyah.
SIME was only to have a relatively short existence, but it played a cru?al
role in the post-war development of British intelligence. Both Douglas Roberts
and his deputy, Maurice Oldfield, were to transfer to 'the firm', bringing with
them many of SIME's most talented case officers. Among them were Myles
Ponsonby and Harold Shergold. Several other senior SIME officers, including
Bill Magan, Alex Kellar, Philip Kirby Green and Bill Oughton, were to become
directors of MI5.
Immediately after the war, the practice of duplicating representatives was
more common, with MI5 officers attached to overseas embassies to sort out old
counter-espionage cases or research aspects of the Soviet apparatus exposed by
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the Germans. Thus, when Charles de Salis and John Bruce Lockhart were
manning the Paris Station during the immediate post-war period, there were
also two Security Service officers on the staff: Jasper Harker, working from
the Military Attache's office, and (Sir) Peter Hope, seconded as a temporary
First Secretary.
Unlike their counterparts in the NKVD, the Soviet intelligence and security
apparatus, SIS staff behind the Iron Curtain made little attempt to avoid being
identified for what they really were. George Berry, for example, who had
taken over the Moscow Station in June 1943, remained there until I95I. Before
the war he had served as British Passport Control Officer in Riga and Vienna,
so he was thoroughly 'blown' long before he ever set foot in Russia. Similarly,
Harold Gibson, another old stager with a long intelligence career who had
been Head of Station in Prague for six years before the war, resumed his post
in 1945. Concealment, of course, would have been somewhat futile, considering
that up until January 1947, when Philby handed R5 over to Brigadier Roberts,
responsibility for co-ordinating SIS's anti-Soviet operations was in the hands
of a colleague who was to be revealed as a long-term NKVD 'mole'.
In reality, it was not the Eastern Bloc stations that undertook the man-
agement of anti-Soviet operations. The real 'front-line' stations in SIS's world-
wide network were actually in the European zones of occupation. Many of
the most dramatic post-war intelligence battles were fought in (and under) the
Allied sectors of Germany and Austria.
?
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The British Control
Commission for Germany
The democracies, who find no difficulty in defining Intelligence objectives,
methods, etc, in time of war, find themselves in a dilemma in a grey period
half-way between war and peace. The satisfactory solving of this dilemma is
a major and pressing problem.'
John Bruce Lockhart, Intelligence: A Britisk View'
?
?
Gem~any's post-war future had been the subject of three inter-Allied confer-
ences, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. It had been agreed that the country was
to be divided into separate zones of occupation and, as soon as the enemy
had been subdued, that the various forces were to withdraw to their own
prearranged sectors. The Russians were to take the north-east, the British the
north-west, leaving the Americans in command of the southem end, plus the
port of Bremen on the North Sea. On 2I June 1945, American troops withdrew
from their combat positions and the new zones formally came into being. As
well as agreeing to carve up what was left of the Reich, the Allies had also
decided to restore Austria's pre-war frontier, the country being regarded,
somewhat controversially, as having been a victim of Nazi aggression rather
than a willing participant in Hitler s Third Reich.
This rather over-generous interpretation of Austria's role before and after
the Anschluss in 1938 did not prevent the country from being divided into
zones of occupation. The Soviets took the eastern third of the country,
comprising of Lower Austria, Burgenland and Upper Austria north of the
Danube. This left the British with Styria, Carinthia and the East Tyrol, with a
zone extending from the Italian frontier, and the Americans with an area of
the Alps, taking in the province of Salzburg and Upper Austria south of the
Danube, which conveniently neighboured the southem limit of their German
territory. Arrangements for Berlin and Vienna, which both lay deep inside the
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Sankt Antonius hospital
? Karlshorst
?
Soviet zones, had also been thrashed out long before the German surrender
and had first been raised in a Soviet proposal presented to the Moscow
conference in October 1943. Berlin was to be divided into three zones, the
British and Americans taking the western end of the city. Vienna was to be
divided into four zones, with the fourth, the city centre, being under tripartite
control. The Soviets had ratified the plan for Berlin at a meeting held at
Lancaster House in London in September 1944, and so, on 4 July I945, they
handed over control of the western sectors to British and American troops.
None of these considerations took account of French sensibilities, eloquently
expressed by General de Gaulle, who demanded, and obtained, part of the
British and American zones in Germany, the North Tyrol and Vorarlberg in
Austria, and part of the western sectors of Berlin and Vienna. Accordingly,
the city centre of Vienna came under quadripartite control, and jeeps canying
a representative from the military police of each of the four countries became
a familiar sight.
Thus Germany and Austria were effectively partitioned, with a visible,
imposed frontier stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic, which was dubbed
?
Hohenschonhausen
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an'iron curtain' by Winston Churchill in his historic speech delivered at Fulton,
Missouri, on 5 March 1946. To a greater or lesser extent, Prague, Warsaw,
Bucharest, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia had Fallen into Russian hands.
Certainly, the Allied occupation was an extraordinary undertaking, which
was generally expected to last for about twenty years. Germany was to be
governed by the Allied Control Council, drawn from the separate Allied
Control Commissions, and Berlin, some 200 miles into the Soviet zone, was
to be run by a joint body known as the Kommandatura. Given Berlin's strategic
position in the heart of East Germany, and considerably closer to Poland
than Hamburg, it was inevitable that the city would become known as the
agenfensumpf or'spy swamp'. Every country established at least one intelligence
headquarters there. SIS had offices in the British Control Commission for
Gemtany (BCCG) at Lancaster House on the Fehrbelliner-Platz and requi-
sitioned abuilding adjoining the Olympic Stadium, where SIS opened a station
in 1946. Since the BCCG was eventually to employ a total of 22,520 staff, it
was easy enough to provide further cover by attaching SIS personnel to the
BCCG's Intelligence Division (ID), a small unit non discreetly by Brigadier
J.S. (Tubby') Lethbridge.
For its part the NKVD, under the notorious Ivan Serov, took over the
old Sankt Antonius hospital in Karlshorst, with the Soviet military intelligence
service, the GRU, operating from an undamaged block in Wiinsdorf. The
Fledgling American intelligence organization (which was not to be Formally
created as the Central Intelligence Agency until September 1947) was to
occupy a building that had once been the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics,
before moving to the C1ayAllee.
In the year immediately following the German surrender, numerous British
intelligence outposts were established. The main centre of SIS operations was
located at Bad Salzuflen, with Harold Shergold in charge, with an outstation
in the British Consulate at Dusseldorf. However, SIS by no means enjoyed a
monopoly on British intelligence functions in the occupied territories. In overall
command was the Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government at 2lst
Army Group HQ, Major-General (later Field Marshal Sir) Gerald Templer. He
had previously run SOE's disastrous German unit, X Section, which had
attempted to infiltrate anti-Nazi agents back into the Third Reich with appalling
losses, and had enjoyed considerable intelligence experience earlier in the war.
His military intelligence staff commandeered an elegant gaming casino at Bad
Oeynhausen, a small spa which, together with two neighbouring undamaged
market towns, Lubeck and Bunde, had become the seat of the military govern-
ment. There Templer and General Bill Williams, Field Marshal Montgomery's
principal intelligence adviser, began to construct an impressive empire, which
extended via the BCCG regional offices throughout the British zone. Further
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afield, in Austria, a former Glasgow Herald journalist, George Young, ran SIS's
Vienna Station, and asub-station to liaise with the British military headquarters
was maintained by Cyril Rolo at Klagenfurt. Many other senior SIS person-
alities, including Daphne Park, James Fulton and John Bruce Lockhart, were to
use the BCCG as cover during the following three years.
Quite apart from the above, dozens of sites throughout the occupied lands
spnmg up to house intelligence personnel, train special forces, provide wireless
interception bases, debrief potentially useful sources and inteaogate suspects.
Mostof thesemaybefound on Map Z.
The real 'front line' of the intelligence war conducted in Germany was the
BCCG. Very little has ever been written about the activities of its Intelligence
Division and its influence on post-war Germany. Among its leading members
were Niall Macdermot, later the Labour MP for Lewisham; Dick White, the
counter-espionage expert on loan from MI5 who, a decade later, was to be
appointed CSS; David Strangeways, a deception specialist from SHAEF who
eventually took up holy orders; D. A. G. Heakes, from Cambridge University,
who edited the ID's fortnightly Counter-Intelligence BulleKn; John Simmonds,
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The British Control Commission for Germany
later the Librarian of All Souls, who headed the ID's sub-section responsible
for the examination of captured enemy documents; Hugh Seton-Watson on
loan from SIS; and Leo Long, from MI14, who attempted to run agents into
the East. His efforts were largely nullified by his then undiscovered dual role
as a Soviet spy.
The ID's task was chiefly liaison: to keep in close touch with MI5, SIS, the
German Political Branch of the Foreign Office and the BCCG's regional
offices, and to supply the newly set-up denazification tribunals with relevant
information. It was a tall order and, given the difficult local working conditions,
the BCCG's inadequate budget and the restrictive political limitations imposed
by the Foreign Office, one that was impossible to achieve with any measure
of success. It certainly left little opportunity for running anti-Soviet operations
which, in any case, were doomed thanks to the activities of Leo Long and
another well-placed Soviet spy in the BCCG's Press Department Z Another
handicap was the presence of two left-wing MPs, Austen Albu and Konni
Zilliacus, who haci both been attached to the BCCG by the incoming Labour
Goven~unent in London. Their role, with Emest Bevin's apparent consent, was
to ensure that when German political parties were eventually allowed to
operate, only the Social Democrats would be in a position to take power.
Zilliacus was a particularly sinister influence and was destined to be expelled
from the Labour Party for his pro-Soviet views.
The purposes of SIS's operations in Austria and Germany during the
immediate post-war period were diffuse. On the security front there was a
determination to uncover and eliminate ail the Nazi or Soviet networks which
signals intelligence reliably indicated had been left behind. As far as the
acquisition of information was concerned, this was limited to the insertion of
individual short-term agents into the East to obtain details of the Soviet order
of battle and possibly some indication of any military build-up which might
betray a surprise move. There was also the political task of ensuring stability
in the western zones and the additional objective of acquiring as much technical
intelligence as might be available. Leading this latter mission was Sir Charles
Hambro, formerly head of SOE, who, with help from an SIS team led by Eric
Welsh, sought out physiasts and other scientists who were judged to be of
use. Welsh used to boast of being the only regular SIS officer with a scientific
degree; as a result, he had worked on Britain's secret attempts to frustrate the
development of a Nazi atomic bomb. The German experts selected by Hambro
and Welsh were either debriefed at a special centre at Gottingen or flown to
RAF Tempsford, home of the wartime Moon Squadrons, where a secluded
country house, Farm Hall, provided secure accommodation with microphones
in every room. A large number of atomic researchers, including a few lacking
anti-Nazi credentials, willingly passed along this route before obtaining a
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security clearance and permanent employment on classified work in England
and the United States.
Another parallel project, codenamed BACKFIRE, recruited German experts
to collaborate with Sir Alwyn Crow, in charge of Britain's top-secret guided
missile programme at the Rocket Propulsion Research Establishment at
Westcott, near Aylesbury. Werner von Braun was one of those who were
taken to England for questioning. 'I must admit that I thought the British
might be unfriendly to me, but [ found I was wrong the first day,' he recalled.'
Nevertheless, he subsequently got a better offer from the Americans. Major
Robert Slaver, who ran the London end of the US scientific intelligence
operation, acknowledged that 'the British pulled a sneaky on us. Partly by
chicanery, and partly through clever staff work, they were able to gain
possession of many of the most important German engineers who they used
on BACKFIRE.'4
Although this particular recruitment programme required the co-operation
of the German experts, there was a quite separate operation run by the
Americans, with the help of some rather desperate Eastern European emigres,
to obtain technical expertise through coercion. In 1948 one such scheme,
aimed at a senior Soviet technician named Colonel Grigori Tokaev, rebounded
against them and provided SIS with its first important defector in the post-
war era.
Tokaev had been a lecturer in jet engine technology and rocket propulsion
at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy in Moscow, and had enjoyed a long
career at the elite Institute of Engineers and Geodesics. However, after the
Nazi surrender, he had been transfen ed to Berlin with very precise orders to
snatch German scientists who might assist Soviet missile research. Although
a committed Communist, Tokaev had been a supporter of Trotsky and was
what might be termed today a dissident. He was utterly opposed to his
instructions and, when he learned that Professor Kurt Tank Focke-Wulf's chief
aircraft designer, was to be grabbed by the NKVD, he underwent a crisis of
conscience. At the very moment he considered defecting to the Americans,
he himself nearly became the victim of a kidnapping by emigres working for
them. He later recalled how he
received further warnings to beware of being kidnapped. I was hunted by
emigre organizations dating from the revolution; they asked me to put
them in touch with underground movements in the USSR; they also tried
to persuade me to desert to the West. I had met their kind when I first
came to Gemtany, but now some of them were strongly backed by foreign
money, and their arrogance had grown beyond belief. They showed me
how closely I was shadowed from outside the Soviet zone as well as from
inside it.?
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Tokaev was alone in his car en route to Schwerin from Berlin when he was
forced off the road by two ernigres. Luckily he was armed, and the two would-
be kidnappers fled. Badly shaken, and convinced that the NKVD was planning
to arrest him for his membership of a group of dissidents, he defected to the
British with his wife and daughter. He was received in Berlin by the local SIS
station and flown straight to London, where he was debriefed by the Special
Liaison Centre headed by Commander Wilfred Dunderdale RNVR.
'Biffy' Dunderdale, in common with other senior SIS officers like Harold
Gibson and Harry Carr, had been born in Russia and spoke the language rather
better than he spoke English. Having joined SIS in Istanbul, Dunderdale had
run the Paris Station for fourteen years until the outbreak of war and had
unrivalled contacts within the White Russian emigre community in France.
During the war he had liaised with the Free French, but afterwards he went
back to his anti-Soviet calling and took over Section V's old offices in Ryder
Street. It was there that he created a highly secret SIS sub-office, staffed mainly
by elderly emigres, and sought to process defectors. His first subject, the head
of the Soviet Reparations Mission in Bremen, Colonel J.D. Tasoev, came over
to the West early in May 1948, but, much to SIS's embarrassment, changed
his mind almost as soon as he reached London. He was promptly returned to
the Russians, after enduring a spell in Hammersmith police station during
which a lengthy debate was held at Broadway about the relative merits of
dumping the recalcitrant Soviet into the North Sea from a height of 20,000
feet. Menzies vetoed that particular solution and Tasoev was delivered safely
to the Kommandatura in Berlin, sparking off a minor diplomatic incident and
a few awkward questions in Parliament.
In contrast, Tokaev's defection proved entirely successful as he provided a
wealth of detailed information about Soviet activities in Gemlany. He later
collaborated with one of his debriefers to write two volumes of autobiography,
Betrayal of an Ideal and Comrade X Tokaev was followed by others, but none
were ever of his stature, so the Special Liaison Centre was eventually closed
down.
The other Western intelligence agenaes had their own particular priorities,
with the Americans placing heavy reliance on the Gehlen organization, which
had been granted an extended life in a special prisoner-of-war compound at
Oberursel, near Frankfurt. There General Reinhard Gehlen, once the master-
mind in charge of the Abwehr s wartime networks on the Russian front,
willingly negotiated a pact with Brigadier-General Edwin Silbert, the senior
US intelligence officer in Germany, and activated his long-term agents in the
East to provide his new American masters with an apparatus that was to
become the Bundesnachrichtendiest, a ready-made intelligence-gathering
machine. SIS had considerable reservations about the deal struck between
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26 The Friends
Silbert and Gehlen, but was powerless to raise formal objections. It was not
so much the principle of collaborating with such a recent enemy, but the
anxiety that the Americans might find themselves in a master/servant role
reversal. After all, Gehlen had had vast experience, whereas the Americans
were relative novices in the field of espionage, despite their huge resources.
In fact, the pact was founded 'on a verbal agreement and a handshake'6 and
had been endorsed by Kenneth Strong, who was 'asked not to enquire too
closely into the matter'.'
SIS had no such advantage, and it was not until late in 1949 that its chosen
nominee, Otto John, was placed in charge of the BfV, the federal internal
security unit which had previously been limited to the running of three refugee
reception centres, where defectors and others with useful scientific, military or
political information could be debriefed. In contrast to the Gehlen organization,
which actively ran high-risk networks of agents into the East, SIS's approach
was to concentrate its limited resources on the interrogation of escapees. The
BfV was an ideal vehicle for such an operation, although John himself was an
unpopular choice, especially with Gehlen, because he had switched sides in
1944 after the ZO July plot against Hitler had failed. He had managed to escape
to Lisbon, where he surrendered to the local SIS station, and subsequently
had been put to work on various 'black propaganda' projects by the Ministry
of Economic Warfare. After the war, he had joined the prosecution staff at
Nuremberg, which had not endeared him to his former friends, and had actually
interrogated Field Marshal von IVlanstein. Gehlen thought him 'unsteady and
rootless, he was not a professional in this field'," and also despised him as a
security risk John was to defect to the East in July 1954, but then returned
five months later, claiming to have been the victim of a kidnapping. The schism
between John and Gehlen did little to foster good relations between the local
representatives of their respective paymasters, SIS and the CIA.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of SIS's post-war operations in
Germany were those run from the British zone into the Russian heartland.
Each mission was authorized by the CSS and his Deputy, Jack Easton, and
received the Foreign Secretary's blessing. The reason for these missions was
Whitehall's growing anxiety about Soviet intentions in Europe. Stalin's swift
take-over in the recently 'liberated' countries, where he had undertaken to
sponsor free and fair elections, was an unmistakable manifestation of old-style
Russian expansionism. Liberal administrations throughout Central Europe were
replaced ruthlessly with Communist regimes, and in the view of the pugnaaous
Bevin, such behaviour could only be deterred by fomenting subversion. There
were no illusions about overthrowing Communism or toppling Moscow's
nominees, but there was a belief that a strategy of encouraging home-grown
resistance would lead to more caution in the Kremlin.
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The British Control Commission for Germany
The route into Russia was not overland, but took advantage of the Royal
Navy's convenient presence in Kiel. A sympathetic Kriegsmarine veteran,
Hans-Helmut ('H-H') Klose, had been recruited in Hamburg by Harold Gibson
to run a clandestine ferry service from the Danish island of Bornholm, through
the Baltic to Estonia and Latvia, using captured E-boats. The case officer in
charge was a recruit from SIME, Anthony Cavendish, who worked closely
with the Naval Intelligence Division's senior representative in Germany,
Commander Anthony Courtney. The Admiralty concealed the operation as
an alternate minesweeping and fishery protection exercise, but the reality was
that SIS infiltrated a substantial number of heavily armed White Russian
emigres into the Soviet Union, where they tried to organize a partisan resistance
movement along the lines of those that had proved so successful against the
Nazis. Among the Naval Intelligence personnel seconded to the operation was
(Sir) John Harvey-Jones, a Russian interpreter who subsequently became
Chairman of ICI. Courtney recalls
providing the SIS with direct naval assistance in the Baltic. This work
involved a close liaison with the Liirssen brothers of Vegesack, where I
was struck by the potential capabilities of stripped-down ex-Kriegsmarine
'E' boat hulls, powered by the incomparable twin Mercedes-Benz 518 diesel
engines. With my assistants, the Staff Officers (Intelligence) at Hamburg
and Kiel, I was frequently at Lubeck and Flensburg and other smaller
harbours such as Eckenforde and Kappeln, from which we mounted our
operations. Little did I know that the penetration of the Foreign Office
and the SIS by the Russian Intelligence Service must have not only doomed
our efforts from the start, but had involved me personally in sending
many a brave man into the jaws of a Soviet trap 9
SIS continued to support the operation long after it became clear to others
that most of the missions were going hopelessly wrong and costing the lives
of expensively trained agents. The drawback of these politically embarrassing,
deniable covert operations is invariably the necessity to depend upon the
participation of individuals who are unlikely to spark off a crisis when caught.
Inevitably this limited deployment in the field to emigres, and restricted the
really experienced operatives to routine training duties in safe areas where
they were unlikely to cause embarrassment. This is exactly what happened
with Easton s anti-Soviet operations, and it was not for some years that
Broadway realized that almost all of the Russian emigre groups in Germany
had been thoroughly penetrated and that its own organization was not exactly
immune to the KGB. Even though several of the illicit wireless contacts
established deep in the Ukraine were shown to be compromised, Harry Carr,
Harold Gibson and other senior SIS staff in London pursued the policy of
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28 The Friends
extending the Cold War right into the Soviet Union. Incredibly, guerrilla bands
were still roaming free, sabotaging the occasional Soviet train, until at least
1954. As we shall see, the Soviets responded by tightening their grip on the
satellite countries already in their control, and took active measures to recruit
sources within both the emigre communities and the West's intelligence services.
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THREE
Palestine 1945-8
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The primary cause of our failure in Palestine was the failure of our intelligence
service.'
Lord Altrincham (formerly Sir Edward Grigg),
British Minister in the Middle East
SIS's bitterly unhappy experience in Palestine is a less than creditable chapter
in Britain's post-war history. It was a frustrating and much misunderstood
attempt to achieve the impossible by reconciling the conflicting aspirations of
Arabs and Jews.
Nowhere were the results of the 1945 general election, called by Churchill
in July, more eagerly awaited than in Palestine, where the British Goverment
had exercised its mandate for more than twenty years. Jewish demands for a
homeland had been vocal since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when the
Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had said that
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours
to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights
of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political
status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Over the years, the first half of this policy statement had received rather
more emphasis than the latter, much to the anxiety of the Arab states in the
Middle East. In order to allay their fears, Chamberlains Government had
issued a White Paper in May 1939, which proposed strict limits on Jewish
immigration for five yeah, and what amounted to an Arab veto on further
Jewish settlement thereafter. This reversal was a highly controversial decision,
especially in the light of the systematic Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany,
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and had been denounced at the timi? by both Churchill and Attlee. It had also
been the spark that had ignited Jewish extremism. Mot surprisingly, in view
of the commitments given by the leaders of both Britain's political parties,
Zionists around the world anticipate} a dramatic improvement in their fortunes
immediately after the 1945 election. After all, both Attlee and Churchill had
pledged themselves to oppose the t~olicy based on the 1939 White Paper, so
the result was presumed to be good news, whoever won. In the event, Attlee
was swept to power and promptly decided to continue with the existing
policy. This was seen by many in the Jewish communities of Palestine and
Europe as nothing less than a betrayal, and served to inflame the Zionists.
The main representative body for Jewish opinion was the Jewish Agency
Eor Palestine, headed by David Ben-Gurion, which also boasted a military
wing, the Haganah. Technically the Haganah was illegal, but many of its
members had been enrolled as armed special constables during the Arab revolts
of 1936-9. By tradition the Haganah pursued a policy of havlagah, the Hebrew
word for self-restraint, and as soon as war had been declared with Germany
the Haganah had suspended its anti-British agitation for the duration. So too
did the Irgun Zvai Leumi, asemi-independent underground organization,
which had taken a more aggressive attitude to the question of a Jewish
homeland in Palestine by carrying out armed attacks on Arab villages. Com-
posed mainly of Polish 'illegals', many of the Irgun's members had volunteered
for service in the British army, whilr others fought in resistance movements
in Europe.
One group of extremists, however, deaded to continue their campaign
against what they perceived as the British occupation of Palestine. Led by
Avraham Stem, the self-styled 'Frerdom Fighters of Israel' robbed banks,
attacked military installations and murdered policemen. Stem was eventually
tracked down on 13 February 1942 in an attic in Mizrachi Street, Tel Aviv,
the home of another terrorist who ha~1 been wounded and captured two weeks
earlier. During his arrest, Stem was shot dead by a British police officer but,
undeterred the Stem Gang continu~?d its activities for a further six years
achieving world-wide notoriety in November 1944 when the British High
Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Moynr, was assassinated in a Cairo street by
two young members of the gang.
By the end of the war, some 130,000 Palestinian Jews had served with the
British forces, of whom 32,000 had joi~led the army, which, in September 1944,
had formed a Jewish Brigade. In short, the Jewish opposition to Britain's
continued role in Palestine was sol?histicated, well-trained and brilliantly
organized. Many, like Moshe Dayan of the Haganah's intelligence unit, the
Sherut Yediot or Shai, had been taug}~t by either SIS or SOE. Dayan had run
a chain of twenty stay-behind clan.iestine wireless stations based around
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Palestine 1945-8 31
Jerusalem for SIS since August 1941, and no less than thirty-two others had
been parachuted into Nazi-occupied territory by SOE. Dayan's direct superior
in the Shai was Isser Harel, a Future head of Mossad (Israel's intelligence
service) who had himself been trained by the Palestine Police. He had been
discharged for insubordination.
Once hostilities in Europe ended, the Irgun renewed its activities under the
leadership of a Polish immigrant, Menachem Begin. He selected his principal
opponent, the Palestine Police's Criminal Investigation Department (CID), as
his main target and wasted no time in masterminding a series of attacks on
various police stations, including the CID's headquarters in Jaffa. In May 1945,
the Anglo-Iraqi pipeline was bombed, and there were numerous other acts of
sabotage perpetrated by the Irgun with the intention of making British rule
untenable.
The British, however, had anticipated an escalation in Jewish violence and,
in a pre-emptive strike in October 1944, had airlifted 251 detainees from the
Caftan internment camp to Kenya. This decisive move had left the Irgun with
only an estimated thirty-forty activists in the field, but this was a sufficient
number for the launch of a series of raids designed to build up a stockpile of
arms. The campaign culminated on b March 1946 in an audacious operation
in which Irgun members masqueraded as British personne! and penetrated the
huge military compound at Sarafand. As well as being garrisoned by the crack
6th Airborne Division, the base also housed Britain's largest overseas signals
interception facility. Without even being challenged, the raiders simply drove
up to the camp's amtoury and loaded rifles, Bren guns and ammunition into
a stolen truck while the quartermaster s staff were held at gunpoint. in spite
of the presence of the paratroopers in the camp, the raiders escaped and all
but two eluded arrest. When the Irgun realized that two of its members,
Michael Ashbel and Joseph Simchon, had been caught, Begin responded by
ordering the kidnapping of five British officers from the Yarkon Hotel in Tel
Aviv to hold as hostages. A sixth, Major H. B. Chadwick, attached to SIME's
office in Jerusalem, was also bundled into a car, but managed to negotiate his
own release. The other five were freed when the death sentence on Ashbel
and Simchor was lifted.
The Sarafand incident was an eloquent demonstration that the Palestine
Police were quite unable to cope with the combined, growing strength of the
Haganah, the Irgun and the Stem Gang, so the Colonial Office requested SIS
assistance. Stewart Menzies was asked to help achieve two important objec-
tives: the formation of acounter-terrorist intelligence group to operate within
Palestine, and the recruitment of a clandestine team to reduce the Flow of
illegal immigrants from Europe. The plan had the support of the new Foreign
Secretary, Bevin, who approved the creation of a small unit headed by General
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(Sir) Bernard Fergusson (later Lord Ballantrae). Until his attachment to the
Palestine Police as Assistant Inspector-General, Fergusson had been Chief of
Combined Operations. Now he was given carte blanche to identify and eliminate
the fanatics who had been widely condemned, especially by the Jewish Agency
whose leadership generally regarded terrorism as a tactic to be counter-
productive. As Fergusson minuted at the time:
There is in the army a small number of officers, who have both technical
and psychological knowledge of terrorism, having themselves been
engaged in similar operations on what may be termed the kerrorist side in
countries occupied by the enemy in the late war.`
The problem of illegal immigration was rather more complex than the
challenge of terrorism in Palestine. A substantial proportion of the survivors
of the Nazi Holocaust were determined to settle in Palestine, yet British policy,
as set out in the 1939 White Paper and enforced by Attlee's administration,
was to reduce the number of entry certificates granted. In 1944, 14,600
certificates had been issued; by the end of the following year, the Figure had
been brought down to I3, I00.
Spurred by outbreaks of officially sponsored anti-Semitic violence in Poland,
the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were moving westwards and joining
the many thousands of 'displaced persons' sheltering in makeshift refugee
camps. The three main routes used and supported by the Haganah were
through Gemlany to Berlin and then Hamburg in the British zone; through
the French zone in Germany and onwards down to Marseilles; and, the most
popular path, via Vienna and then Villach in the British sector. From there the
Haganah ran two underground railroads, known as brycha, down the Adriatic
coast of Italy, or to ports like Sizak in Yugoslavia. Having got thus far, the
refugees weze ferried to beaches in Palestine in an assortment of patched-up,
war-surplus tramp steamers. Between August 1945 and May 1946 some
73,000 'illegals' were believed to have been carried to thew homeland in around
sixty-four unseaworthy ships. The Royal Nary attempted to enforce a blockade
and intercept vessels thought to be carrying 'illegals', but its intelligence was
inadequate and the highly publicized incidents involving the an:est of refugee
ships in the Mediterranean and the internment of their human cargoes in
Cyprus and Mauritius had a poor reception in the United States. This latter
consideration was to become increasingly important as the Jewish community
in America rallied to the Zionist cause. On a couple of occasions the Haganah
preferred to blow up its own ships rather than face British detention, providing
more embarrassing headlines in New York
The exodus was entirely against the British Government's stated policy
and, as Arab opposition grew, threatened to destabilize the region. Under-
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standably, the Arab states in the Middle East viewed the influx of Jews into
Palestine with alarm. As the Arabs controlled the oilfields, it was in Britain's
long-tem1, strategic interests to be allied with its traditional friends and
maintain a balance to ensure regional peace. Therefore numerous compromise
solutions, such as the partition of Palestine, were under debate, but from the
Jewish viewpoint no further discussion was necessary. A homeland had been
promised to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration and, after the Nazi death-
camp experience, any hardship could be endured in their escape from Europe
and in the fulfilment of that promise. The Haganah aimed to ensure the safety
of the refugees en route, and the Irgun vowed that it would bring the mandate
to a swift end.
In January 1946, Sir Noel Charles, Britain's Ambassador in Rome, reported
to London that 'we are doing our utmost to check the clandestine influx of
refugees from Austria',2 but he did not go into details. In fact, in response to
a directive from Menzies, information from the SIS stations in Paris, Vienna,
Milan and Trieste were being collated in Rome, which was SIS's largest
European station, by Colonel Harold Perkins, who had devised a scheme to
disrupt the traffic of weapons and refugees: limpet mines were to be attached
to the refugee ships so as to prevent them from reaching Palestine. The man
chosen to undertake this sensitive task was Frederick Vanden Heuvel, a Count
of the Holy Roman Empire and a director of Eno's Fruit Salts, who until
recently had been the long-serving SIS Head of Station in Beme. Vanden
Heuvel had been replaced in Switzerland by Nicholas Elliott in 1945 and, upon
his return to Broadway, had been assigned the Rome Station, where Kenneth
Benton was, already in command, with secret instructions to launch ananti-
Haganahoperation. Vanden Heuvel chose two other SIS officers to accompany
him: Perkins and Wing-Commander Derek Verschoyle.
Perkins had graduated from Prague University with a degree in engineering
and had gone on to qualify as a master mariner. By the time war broke out,
he had teamed some Polish and had become the owner-manager of a small
textile mill in Bielsko, Silesia. He had an awesome reputation for toughness,
and one of his SIS colleagues, Bickham Sweet-Escott, recalled that 'Perks' was
'the only man I have ever actually seen bend a poker in his hands'' He worked
in the Polish section of SOE throughout the war and eventually headed it,
along with the Czech and Hungarian sections. When the Germans evacuated
Prague, Perkins had appointed himself the acting British Charge d'Affaires, a
post he kept for some weeks until the pre-war SIS Head of Station, Harold
Gibson, had flown out to relieve him.
Although perhaps not quite as colourful as Perkins, Verschoyle was an
Irishman, educated at Trinity, Dublin, who had been the literary editor of the
SpecEator before he had joined the RAF in 1940. Thereafter, he had served
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34 The Fiends
Bomber Command and the Mediterranean Allied Forces before transferring to
SIS. His cover in Rome was First Secretary. His deputy, responsible For liaising
with the Italian authorities, had formerly served in SIS's Dutch country section.
Vanden Heuvel's plan was to infiltrate agents into the Haganah's network
using the SIS representatives in Locamo and Milan, Lance de Garston and
Edward de Haan. One early success was the discovery of an arms dump of
over forty tons of weapons in the Magenta displaced-persons camp west of
Milan. However, their main objective was to find out which Adriatic harbour
had been selected Eor the 'illegals' next embarkation point. Once identified,
Perkins's task was to procure the necessary equipment and then plant the
explosives on the side of the vessel well below the waterline. A timer was
used to ensure that the ship was sunk away from port in international waters.
Apparently, one refugee ship was successfully attacked, but the operation was
cancelled when the Haganah retaliated.
Meanwhile, in Palestine, the level of violence had escalated. On I3 July
1945, a police constable was killed when a British army truck carrying
detonators was ambushed. On 25 July, the Lydda-Kantara railway link was
cut when a bridge was blown up. In the spring of 1946, two terrorists were
killed in an attack on the police headquarters at Ramat Gan, and the Irgun
launched its raid on Sarafand.
This was the atmosphere in which Fergusson operated, but he experienced
great difficulty in obtaining help from the community or in recruiting agents.
As Begin later remarked:
British Intelligence did its best to introduce informers into our ranks and
to acquire agents from among our members. In all the years of the revolt
theee were only three cases of treachery and the enemy Intelligence never
once succeeded in introducing their own agents into the underground
without their being discovered almost immediately. They never
succeeded -and this is most important - in getting agents into positions
high up in the direction of the struggle.'
Certainly, the one useful source inside the Stem Gang, Israel Prizker, was shot
for 'helping British Intelligence
The British response to the Sarafand raid was Operation BROADSIDE,
executed on Z9 June 1946, in which all the Jewish Agency offices in Palestine
were occupied and 3,000 people were taken into custody and questioned at a
special purpose-built camp at Rafiah, near the Egyptian border. The exercise
yielded the first solid information about the composition of the Irgun and the
Stem Gang, and led the Haganah to issue a formal statement withdrawing its
support from armed conflict. Menachem Begin was identified as the Irgun's
leader and Yaacov Meridor as his deputy. A list of 1,500 Irgun supporters
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was compiled with the Haganah's help, and a further wave of arrests followed.
Begin, who had a ?10,000 price on his head, was never caught by the
authorities, but moved constantly from one safe-house to another in the Tel
Aviv area, disguised as a bearded rabbi. He has subsequently described this
period of his life in The Revolt, in which he admitted that, even though the
Haganah had publicly dissociated itself Erom the Irgun, up to September 1946
they had maintained a close liaison and had held joint conferences to approve
plans every fortnight.
The Irgun reacted to BROADSIDE by striking at the heart of the British
administration. Seven milk chums packed with high explosives were placed
under the south wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which accom-
modated the army's General Headquarters. Ninety-one were killed and IIO
injured, including fifteen Jewish civilians, when the six-storey structure col-
lapsed in the explosion.
The King David Hotel bomb, which had been detonated before a proper
warning could be given or the south wing evacuated, created outrage in
Britain, among many of the Zionists and certainly among the security forces,
which urged a crackdown and an end to further immigration. However, for
political reasons, neither followed. Bevin was then attempting with President
Truman to find a compromise solution, involving autonomous but separate Arab
and Jewish provinces in Palestine. Despite endless meetings the negotiations
came to little, apparently because of Zionist pressure on Truman's domestic
supporters. Their plan was to demand partition and then create a Jewish state.
The British response was to allow Perkins and his team in Italy a free hand
in choking off the supply of arms and volunteers bound for Palestine, but the
combined forces of the Irgun and the Haganah had antiapated the escalation.
The first counter-attack took place on 9 September 1946, when the senior SIS
officer in Tel Aviv, Major Desmond Doran, was assassinated by a grenade
while sitting on the balcony of his house with his Romanian-born wife, Sanda,
who was badly injured. Two other SIS officers escaped unhurt. Before the war
Doran had served in Berlin and had been Head of Station in Bucharest before
transferring to ISLD in Cairo. His death is thought to be the only 'active
service' casualty SIS has suffered in the post-war era. On the same day, a
Palestine Police CID sergeant with twelve years' experience was shot in the
back outside the popular Windsor Hotel. He had recently masterminded the
arrest, interrogation and deportation of Begin's principal lieutenant, an activist
named Yitzhak Ysernitzky. The third incident occurred early in the morning
of 3I October, when two suitcase bombs were placed against the front
door of the British Embassy in Rome; the explosion rendered the building
uninhabitable. The Italian police later aaested Israel Epstein, who was impri-
soned for the offence.
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36 The Friends
Now the security situation in Palestine deteriorated badly. A young member
of the Irgun, Israel Kimche, was arrested for carrying weapons and sentenced
to eighteen lashes. The punishment was carried out on 27 December 1946 in
Jerusalem's Central Prison, and prompted the kidnapping of a British major
and three NCOs. Each was flogged and then released.
Conditions in Palestine were such that the Govenunent ordered Operation
PO LLY to be implemented -the withdrawal ofnon-essential personnel -and
the security forces were increased to reach their peak of 100,000. On 25
January 1947, another terrorist, Dov Groner, who had been wounded and
caught during the Irgun's raid on Ramat Gan, was sentenced to death. Like
many other members of the Irgun, Gruver had spent three years in the British
army during the war. None of the Jewish terrorists captured to date had been
executed, but Gruver s case was markedly different. An Arab policeman had
been shot in the raid and an automatic had been found in Gruner's hand.
Forensic tests showed that it had been fired recently. The Irgun responded to
the verdict by kidnapping a retired officer, Major H. A. Collins, in Jerusalem
and a judge, Mr Justice Windham, the following day in Tel Aviv. They were
later released, unharmed, when the curfew had been lifted, along with the
threat of martial law.
The sentence on Dov Groner, together with three other Irgun activists, was
carried out in Acre Prison on 17 April 1947. Six days later, another two
convicted fanatics were due to hang in Jerusalem Prison, but shortly before
the sentence was carried out both men blew themselves to pieces with a
grenade that had been smuggled into the death cell by a rabbi.
The Irgun's most spectacular raid took place the following month, on 4
May, while the United Nations attempted to find a solution to the Palestine
problem On that day the Irgun attacked Aae Prison and blew a hole in the
perimeter wall, allowing 25I prisoners to break out, including twenty-riine
Irgun detainees. The attack had been planned by Dov Cohen, a veteran of
Dunlark and the Jewish Brigade, who was killed while giving covering fire to
the escapers. Close by was the body of Michael Ashbel, one of those an-ested
after the Sarafand raid. Several Irgun terrorists were arrested in the aftermath
and, later, three were sentenced to death The British Commander-in-Chief,
General McMillan, warned his troops only to leave the military compounds
armed and in groups of four, but this was clearly an impossible restriction for
members of SIME. Thus, on IZ June, two SIME sergeants, Clifford Martin
and Mervyn Paice, were kidnapped late at night in Natanya and held as
hostages for the lives of the three Irgun men. When they were executed,
Martin and Paice were hanged and their bodies left, booby-trapped with a
landmine, in a grove of eucalyptus trees near Natanya.
These events prompted a bloody, anti-Semitic reaction from soldiers and
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police alike, and resulted in several violent demonstrations in England. They
also brought an end to General Fergusson's experiments with 'counter-gangs'.
His method had been to deploy two teams of ten men each, headed by Alistair
MacGregor and Roy Fan an. MacGregor was an experienced intelligence
operative who had been nominated for the job by his former employers, SIS,
while Farrar had fought a highly irregular war with Italian partisans and the
Znd Special Air Service Regiment and had seen action in the desert at El
Alamein, France, Norway, Albania, Syria and Crete, where he had briefly been
a prisoner of war, before escaping and enduring nine days in an open boat.
As a genuine war hero and living legend, Farrar had been recruited by
Ferguson while instructing cadets at Sandhurst. He was, of course, an enthusi-
astic exponent of counter-terrorist tactics, but in October 1947 he was charged
with the torture and murder of an Irgun suspect named Alexander Rubowitz.
Farran had been arrested soon after Rubowitz's disappearance, but had escaped
from custody. He was eventually found in Damascus, where Ferguson visited
him and persuaded him to return to Palestine to face a court martial. At the
trial Farrah s alleged confession was ruled inadmissible, and Fergusson declined
to give evidence for the prosecution in order to avoid incriminating himself.
With only very circumstantial evidence to link Farrar to the crime, he was
acquitted, but a price was put on his head by the Irgun. A year after these
events, his younger brother Rex was killed when he opened aparcel-bomb
simply addressed to R. Farrar'.
The dissolution of Fergusson's secret unit ended Britain's clandestine
involvement in Palestine. During 1947 a United Nations Commission, headed
by a Swedish Supreme Court judge, Emil Sandstrom, toured Palestine in the
hope of achieving a settlemerit. His Commission s recommendation, partition,
was proposed on 31 August and was then debated at the United Nations. The
Haganah proved itself to be extremely successful in political manoeuvring
during this critical period, actively exploiting Jewish sympathy around the
world. Leading the Israeli delegation to the United Nations was Major Aubrey
Eban, a former Cambridge don and Chief Instructor at the British Army's
Middle East Arab Centre in Jerusalem until he resigned his commission in
1946.
The Haganah used all its guile and experience to ensure that the United
Nations vote established an independent Israel. It was discovered, for example,
that the limousine company supplying the British delegation ko the United
Nations with transport was Jewish owned As a result, every journey made
by the delegates from their office in New York to the UN General Assembly's
special session at Lake Success on Long Island was bugged, giving the Jewish
Agency useful information about British intentions. Indeed, Jewish businessmen
were also allocated rooms in hotels duectly under or adjoining those of the
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debate's main participants. it was a skilfully conducted surveillance operation
that eventually helped to ensure that, on 29 November, the final vote, of
thirty-three to thirteen, was in favour of partition. Britain was among the
ten abstentions. This was followed swiftly by Bevin's announcement of Britairis
intention to withdraw from Palestine on I4 May 1948.
SIS's Palestine episode was in complete contrast to everything previously
experienced. Unlike in Germany, where the local population broadly welcomed
the Western occupiers, there was little relief from Ehe hostility of dvilians. Nor
were the British forces perceived to be the victors. In fact, quite the reverse,
with people on all sides acknowledging the futility of Britain's extended
presence. Indeed, initially at least, there was a good deal of sympathy within
the police and intelligence community for the Jewish cause.
Nor were SIS combating a structured organization, in the sense that the
opposition did not have obvious lines of communication which could be
tapped or disrupted. The potent but hidden weapon of GCHQ's crypt-
analytical skills were of little use, save for revealing the very close, covert
relationship between the Irgun and the Haganah. This was discovered by
routine monitoring of the Jewish Agency's traffic on the cable link between
Tel Aviv and New York. Unfortunately, there were enough members of the
Haganah with cryptographic knowledge to urge caution when sending coded
messages to the United States. In any event these signals, although intercepted
and read, showed only the political initiatives undertaken by the Agency and
betrayed nothing of a tactical nature which could be of use to the authoriEies
in the field.
The Haganah and the Irgun wisely made little use of the wireless for
operational purposes and were resourceful opponents, unlike the Stem Gang
who caused widespread resentment, even within the host community. Since
they had been largely trained by the British, they knew exactly what to expect
and thus were able to plan accordingly. They also had remarkable success in
planting agents inside the Palestine Police. The veteran CID inspector in
charge of anti-Communist surveillance, Yehuda Arazi, fumed out to be a Shai
mole, supplying the Haganah with the identities of the few police informers
within the organization.
The Jewish Agency virtually controlled the propaganda battle from the
outset and was extremely effective in manipulating public opinion overseas,
particulazly in the United States where President Truman proved a compliant
supporker of Zionist aspirations.
From the start Britain was in a no-win situation. The prinaple of partition
had long been resisted because of determined Arab opposition. Any British-
sponsored solution dividing the territory would have led to conflict straight-
away as actually happened immediately after the withdrawal. The underlying
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fear was that such a compromise would only alienate Palestine's Arab neigh-
bours and maybe force them to look to the Soviets for support. There was
also anxiety about Muslim opinion in India, where British relations with the
Islamic population were highly volatile.
In strategic terms Israel was regarded as being of minimal long-term
significance. The expensive military bases were redundant, a duplication of
facilities already in use in Egypt and Cyprus. Even the listening-post at Sarafand
was judged to be expendable because of the attractive alternative sites in
Cyprus. The British Government recognized these realities, but was also keenly
aware of its responsibilities under the mandate to achieve the impossible: the
peaceful cohabitation of two warring communities.
The security and intelligence picture in Palestine was always depressing. The
British forces were entirely isolated and, after Operation POLLY, effectively
imprisoned themselves in fortified garrisons. The hanging of convicted ter-
rorists failed to appease public opinion at home, which could not understand
why so many servicemen were being killed and injured without any adequate
response. Yet the same hangings, particularly of Dov Gruver, who had part
of his highly articulate family resident in America, were a propaganda disaster
in the United States. The Haganah was rich, influential, secretive and sufficiently
well organized to resist all the measures that the authorities might normally
have relied upon. Nor could SIS depend on Arab sources to provide accurate
intelligence information. The real humiliation of SIS's experience in Palestine
was that it was forced to abandon the country, lock, stock and barrel. There
was no unofficial liaison between the Mossad and SIS, and both Nigel Clive
and his deputy were blown' almost as soon as they opened their office in
Jerusalem and, had to be evacuated. In their stead, David Balfour, who had
taught at Athens University until the German invasion and had spent part of
the waz as an agent disguised as Father Dimitri, a Greek Orthodox monk, was
appointed Head of Station, under Oriental Secretary cover, at the Embassy in
Tel Aviv. There he remained, under constant and hostile Israeli surveillance,
until his transfer to Smyrna in 1951.
Perhaps the last word on this episode should be left to Menachem Begin,
who observed:
The British Secret Service is an institution enveloped in legend. Who has
not heard of its achievements? The legend has been passed on from
generation to generation, and from country to country, and from continent
to continent -until some have come to believe that the British Intelligence
is omniscient and infallible. Those who are interested in the dissemination
of such stories know that in spying, as in waz, the legend of success is in
itself a success factor. The strength of British Intelligence however does
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not lie only in the legend. This Service was, and may still prove to be, a
tremendous factor in international relations. It has at its disposal the
accumulated experience of centuries.
But during the revolt in Eretz Israel neither great experience nor the
vast resources of the British Intelligence Service were of much help. The
Hebrew underground smote the Intelligence hip and thigh. We proved
that the Secret Service was neither omniscient nor infallible.s
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Malaya 1948-5 7
The Emergency will be won by our intelligence system.'
General Sir Gerald Templer'
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No sooner had the withdrawal from Palestine been completed than an entirely
new Emergency was declared on the other side of the world to challenge the
British intelligence bureaucrats. The start of the Communist-inspired insur-
rection in Malaya began on I5 June 1948 with the murder of three European
rubber planters, but the roots of the matter went back much further.
The Japanese had invaded Malaya in 1942 and had remained in control for
the next three years, thus eliminating any ideas about 'white supremacy' that
the colonial authorities might have given to the local population. When the
surrender took place in 1945, there were only a handful of Force I36 liaison
officers on the scene from SOE, who were powerless to prevent the Chinese-
dominated Malay Communist Party (MCP) from taking control of many of
the Waal areas. This unsatisfactory state of affairs was short-lived and British
rule was slowly re-established.
The origin of the sudden rise in anti-British agitation in 1948 was a secret
meeting of the Cominfonn held in London in January the same year, followed
a month later by a much larger gathering in Calcutta, under cover of an
international Asian youth congress. Both had been monitored by MI5 and
the Security Service's local representative organization, Combined Intelligence
Far East (CIFE). The second meeting had been attended by British, Australian
and Soviet delegates, as well as individuals from the Communist parties of
various Far Eastern countries. The assembled group was given a message from
Andrei A. Zhdanov, the Cominform's leading theoretician, that Burma, Malaya,
French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies were ripe for the 'armed struggle
against Imperialism'.
This claim was not entirely relevant to Malaya, where Britain had already
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agreed to the principle of 'ultimate self-government' and had taken the first
step by creating the Federation of Malaya. However, this did not stop the
MCP from stepping up its campaign of demonstrations, labour unrest and
violence against the more isolated rubber estates. Its plan, as confirmed by
captured documents, was to drive the European planters off their land and to
sabotage the tin mines, thus making a continued British presence uneconomic
and impractical. Terrorist attacks would force the authorities to mobilize and
concentrate their resources in certain limited areas. The MCP would, therefore,
have an opportunity to create bases in the'liberated' jungle from which guerrilla
raids could be mounted. Finally, according to the MCP masterplan, the
liberated areas would link up for a wholesale war against the Imperialists. That,
at least, was the theory.
In reality, the MCP only had a few thousand active supporters, drawn
mainly from veterans of the anti-Japanese resistance army that had been trained
by SOE instructors and supplied with British materiel. Instead of being turned
in at the time of the Japanese surrender, these weapons had been hidden in
caches, ready to be used again. The inspiration behind these tactics was Chen
Ping, the MCP's recently appointed General-Secretary ... and holder of the
Order of the British Empire. During the Japanese occupation he had organized
Force 136 networks and the decoration had been awarded in recognition of
his outstanding work. He had also attended the victory parade in London and
had received Lord Mountbatten's personal thanks for his contribution to the
Japanese defeat. Aged twenty-seven, he had succeeded to power in the MCP
largely due to the duplicity of his Vietnamese predecessor, Lai Teck, who had
been along-term double agent working for the Malay Special Branch. A series
of breaches in security had compromised Lai Teck and he had been withdrawn
from the field in March 1947, allowing Chen Ping to take control of the
movement. His first initiative was to impose a militant, confrontationalist
policy and embark on an armed struggle against the British designed to make
them repeat their all-too-pain[ul experience in Palestine.
The parallels with the situation in Palestine are evident, but in spite of being
well trained and well equipped, the MCP did not enjoy the popular support
of the Malayan natives who were easily intimidated by Chinese ten orism.
However, the greatest similarity was to be found in the intelligence community,
which included many men with experience in Palestine. Indeed, the High
Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, had been the Chief Secretary in Palestine,
and the Police Commissioner, Colonel Nicol Gray, a former Royal Marine
commando, had been Inspector-General of the Palestine Police until the end
of the mandate.
The Malayan Federation's police force also boasted a Special Branch, headed
by Ian Wylie, and asemi-independent Security Service run by Colonel John
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Dalley. Both organizations were handicapped by a lack of records, which had
been completely destroyed during the Japanese occupation, and amorale-
sapping internal rivalry that stemmed Erom the British surrender in 1942. The
police officers who had obeyed orders and remained at their posts had endured
appalling conditions in Changi Gaol; these old hands, who had experienced
being 'in the bag', bitterly resented their colleagues who had slipped away
before the collapse to fight what they perceived to have been a glamorous
war with SOE's Force 136 in the jungle. It was widely known that one
particular group of diehards in the Malay civil service had actually condemned
the escapees to death and had refused to speak to them after the war.
Gray, Dalley and Wylie liaised with MI5 and SIS through two separate
chains of command: the Security Liaison Officer in Kuala Lumpur, and Courtney
Young's successor at CIFE in Singapore, Jack Morton. Representing SIS was
Dick Ellis, on attachment to Malcolm MacDonald's staff at the office of the
UK Commissioner-General for South-East Asia.
When Morton had been sent out to run CIFE in 1948, he was quite
unprepared for the chaotic intelligence arrangements that prevailed. Half of
the Malayan personnel refused to co-operate with the other half, and they all
resented the influx of Gray's hundred or so Palestinians'. Partly as a conse-
quence of all this hostility, the army had taken it upon itself to conduct its
own anti-terrorist operations, guided by the Director of Military Intelligence,
Colonel Paul Gleadell. A series of unfortunate incidents had followed, including
several where army patrols had been ambushed in error by the paramilitary
police jungle units, and vice versa.
The security situation continued to deteriorate throughout the following
year, so Morton lequested the appointment of an Intelligence Adviser to
execute the administrative reforms he believed essential to beat the MCP. His
nominee was Sir William Jenkin, formerly the Deputy Director of the Indian
Central Intelligence Bureau. Jenkin had a wealth of experience dealing. with
Indian nationalist subversion and was believed to be of sufficient stature to
cope with the bitter internecine jealousies which were crippling the anti-
insurgency programme. Yet even Jenkin found the strife too difficult to cope
with and demanded the creation of an entirely new post, Director of Intelligence,
to supervise the functions of the Special Branch, the Security Service and CIFE.
Although there were optimistic expectations of this new hierarchy, it was not
to last long. Jenkin eventually quan elled with Gray over a demarkation dispute
involving the Spedal Branch and suddenly resigned, returning to London
without bothering to say the customary farewells to his staff.
The complicated disputes which soured the atmosphere within the intel-
ligence community in Malaya spilled over into MI5 and SIS, and eventually
affected every area of security. Certainly for years afterwards, the 'Malayan
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mafia' was a powerful group within the Security Service. Few have written
about this unhappy episode .in Britain's post-war experience, but Sir Robert
Thompson, the Director of Operations appointed in 1950, has lectured on
counter-insurgency policy and the following passage in particular sums up the
position in Malaya at the time:
Ideally there should be one single organization responsible Eor all security
intelligence within the country. If there is more than one, it is almost
impossible to define the respective responsibilities of each organization or
to devise any means of co-ordinating their activities. All sorts of things
will start to go wrong. For example, agents, especially the less reliable,
will get themselves on to the payroll of several organizations and feed
them the same unreliable information. Such information seemingly
confirmed from different sources will be accepted as authentic. The
different organizations will withhold information from one another in order
to exploit it and obtain the credit for themselves. A promising line of
intelligence promoted by one organization may well be cut inadvertently,
or even intentionally, by another organization. Mutual suspicion and
jealousies will arise, quite likely with the result that the separate
organizations merely end up spying on each other. The intelligence, on
which government plans should be based, will be both patchy and
unreliable. The best organization to be responsible for all internal security
intelligence is the special branch of a police force rather than a completely
separate organization. It is a great advantage if intelligence officers have
police powers and are able to call when necessary on the other branches
of the police for support and assistance for developing their intelligence
rietwork.Z
An attempt was made to persuade Dick White, then MI5's Director of B
Division, the counter-espionage branch, to take on Jerkin's vacant post, but
he declined the offer. Instead, Morton succeeded to it and acquired Maurice
Oldfield, formerly the head of SIS's R5, who joined CIFE's joint service
section. Together Morton and Oldfield proved a formidable team, reorganizing
the Special Branch and creating a training centre at the Federal Police head-
quarters in the Bluff Road complex outside Kuala Lumpur. Under Morton's
direction, the arrangements for the internment of suspects was expanded, with
over 6,000 taken into custody, and some 700 Malay Chinese were deported
to China.
The disunity within the Malay intelligence community only served to
encourage the MCP, which enjoyed a multiplicity of sources, including the
High Commissioners butler and several agents planted within the Special
Branch. On 6 October 1951, following a leak of information, disaster struck.
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?
Ma/aya 1948-57
Sir Henry Gurney's official Rolls-Royce was ambushed on the road to his
regular weekend retreat at Fraser's Hill, ahill-station some forty miles to the
north of Kuala Lumpur. Gurney was shot dead as he walked away from his
wrecked, bullet-riddled car, and all his police escorts were wounded. Gurney's
assassination plunged Malaya into further uncertainty. The European estate
managers, who had feared the worst the previous year when Britain had given
formal recognition to the Communists in China, lost what little confidence
they had left. Simultaneously, the administration was thrown into disan ay -
which was not helped by the absence of the Chief Secretary who happened
to be abroad on leave -and the Government in London was distracted by
the general election then in progress. Morale was at an all-time low. The police
had no information about the perpetrators of the crime and most evaded
capture, with only two of the insurgents being killed in brief fire-fights.
Gurney's murder proved to be a turning-point for the security situation.
Once the general election was over, the new Colonial Secretary, Oliver
Lyttelton, conducted a tour of inspection and was appalled by what he found.
It was, he recalled, far worse than he had imagined possible and he remarked
that he had 'never seen such a tangle as that presented by the Government of
Malaya.... The police itself was divided by a great schism between the
Commissioner of Police and the Head of the Special Branch. Intelligence
was scanty and unto-ordinated between the civil and military authorities.''
Lyttelton made a second, clandestine visit to Kuala Lumpur to prepare a
damning report on the situation, and then returned to London to invite General
Sir Gerald Templer to take the two jobs of British High Commissioner and
Director of Operations. The proposal met with fierce opposition from Malcolm
MacDonald and the Foreign Office, on the grounds that the appointment
should not have been a military one, but they were won round. After that,
the situation changed swiftly.
In January 1952, Nicol Gray resigned and went to work for the Jockey Club
in Newmarket. His replacement was Colonel (Sir) Arthur Young, a career
police officer who had just completed the reorganization of the colonial police
in the Gold Coast. The next month Templer swept into office and, together
with Young, restored morale. Although there may have been some initial
apprehension about Young's appointment, for his previous experience had
been strictly limited to routine police work, he soon demonstrated his high
regard for the Special Branch. Templer, too, was populaz. As well as having
taken on responsibility for security matters in Germany immediately after the
war, he had served inmost branches of intelligence: he had been the intelligence
liaison officer with the British Expeditionary Force in France on the outbreak
of waz and, more recently, had been Director of Military Intelligence between
1946 and 1948.
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~ The Friends
Templer recognized that the predominantly Chinese insurgents would only
be beaten through a combination of excellent intelligence and what he termed
a campaign to win 'the hearts and minds of the people'. Accordingly, he threw
himself into the execution of a controversial scheme that had become known
as the Briggs Plan, after its architect, Sir Harold Briggs, his predecessor as
Director of Operations. This called for a ruthless resettlement programme
involving the relocation of up to half a million squatters, who eked out an
agricultural existence in the rural areas and were easy prey for the MCP and
its undercover intelligence unit, the Min Yuen. The Briggs Plan required all
the squatter hamlets to be destroyed and the inhabitants brought into 600
'new villages', their perimeters surrounded by wire fences and controlled by
a police post. Before going out to work in the morning, each villager could
be frisked by troops to ensure that they had no concealed food or weapons.
The objective was to prevent the guerrilla bands from obtaining either money
or food from the peasants, thus forcing the insurgents to rely on their own
limited resources in the jungle. There they could be pursued by the 20,000
troops, 40,000 Home Guard and 60,000 police that had been deployed against
them. Although initially unpopular, the concept of the 'new villages' soon
caught on because, for the first time in their lives, the squatters were granted
ownership of the land they occupied and cultivated. They also enjoyed running
water, electriaty, schools, medical care and even a degree of democracy
through locally elected councils. Thanks to the land grants, they had a stake
in the country -and, therefore, something to lose.
In fact, the Min Yuen probably never had more than 15,000 members, and
the number of terrorists at any one time did not exceed 5,000. Nevertheless,
they proved to be extremely versatile, well-armed opponents, slipping out of
the jungle to launch surprise raids before disappearing back into its cover. In
response, Templer's tactics involved the distribution of identity cards, curfews
and collective fines. He would concentrate his men on small areas, clearing
them of terrorists and destroying the food caches, so that they could later be
declared 'white' and freed of the Emergency restrictions.
Just the issuing of identity cards was an immense undertaking. A common
system of registering Chinese names was required and the one adopted was
the so-called Chinese Commercial Code, which transposed numerals to the
components of particular Chinese characters of the script containing one word
or name. Chinese scholars were recruited to transform the ideographs, which
even the illiterate Chinese could use for their own names, into the appropriate
CCC numbers. The fact that it takes a knowledge of 7,000 characters to be
able to read a newspaper gives an idea of the scale of the task before the
Security Service. None the less, the system was introduced and it worked
extremely well, becoming a vital way of identifying suspects. Another related
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development was the construction of a secret military holding centre, where
prisoners could be screened and defectors processed.
Very gradually the situation began to get better and, during 1952, some
1,097 insurgents were killed, a dramatic improvement on the performance of
the previous two years. Many, but not all, of these contacts resulted from the
change in methods adopted by both the army and the intelligence personnel.
Instead of guarding fixed points and waiting, defensively, to be attacked, the
military stepped up its ground patrols, dropping small teams of bandit hunters
into the rain forest by Royal Navy helicopters. There they would wait in
ambush for the insurgents, before clearing a space so that they could be air-
lifted out to another location. Some teams spent weeks at a time in the jungle,
being resupplied by air. To increase the harassment, incendiary bombs were
dropped on all the crops in terrorist-dominated areas, thus forcing the rebels
to keep on the move.
The idea was to exert a relentless pressure which could be exploited by the
intelligence staff, who collaborated with a specialist psychological warfaze
unit to produce millions of morale-sapping leaflets and safe-conduct passes.
Defectors were promised good treatment, the best food and a variety of
rewards for any senior MCP cadres they identified. For those who were
illiterate, 'voice aircraft' flew regular missions broadcasting persuasive messages
from defectors calling on their comrades to surrender. The scheme was so
successful that some deserters surrendered carrying bags of decapitated heads
so that they could claim the bounties on their comrades.
Each defector added another piece to the intelligence jigsaw of the MCP,
and gradually the Security Service could produce a list of all the active
Communist ten:orists, or CTs as they became known, in Malaya. It was a
highly effective undertaking, aided by several innovative schemes. On one
occasion, for example, speaally prepazed 'surplus' radios were allowed to find
their way on to the Chinese black market, in the knowledge that they would
be snapped up quickly by the Min Yuen. Indeed they were, but the insurgents
were unaware that each wireless set also acted as a beacon, transmitting a
homing signal which could be traced, thus betraying its location.
As the intelligence effort expanded, so more experienced staff were drafted
in. Arthur Martin, one of MI5's molehunters, was sent out to Singapore to
relieve the SLO, Keith Way, and ended up nuuiing the Kuala Lumpur Special
Branch, with Guy Madoc heading the Security Service. Martin was joined by
Alec MacDonald, a future Director of MI5's counter-espionage branch.
By May 1953, the tide had fumed in favour of the security forces, who
were becoming adept at exploiting the Speaal Branch's infomlation. As a
result, the number of successful contacts and fire-fights multiplied. In one
pazticulaz ambush Ah Kuk, Chen Ping's military commander for most of
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Southern Malaya, was killed, an event that boosted morale amongst the
security forces but had the opposite effect on the MCP. The number of MCP
defections increased to such a rate that a new unit, the Special Operations
Volunteer Force, was created, made up exclusively of 'turned' guerrillas. In
addition, eleven former members of Chen Ping's central executive committee
switched sides. Although some had been tempted by the high rewards on
offer, others recognized the futility of fighting on when the British had already
announced that 'Malaya should in due course become aself-governing nation'.
Indeed, when Templer's first 'white' area was declared in September 1953, it
reportedly attracted quite a number of disaffected MCP members who had
tired of the struggle and simply wished to Live in peace, free of the Emergency
regulations and safe in the knowledge that a representative political structure
was in the process of being constructed.
In June 1954, his task almost completed, Templer returned to London as
the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff (GIGS) and was succeeded by his
deputy, Sir Donald MacGillivray. He was responsible for negotiating away
the last chance the guerrillas had: a safe haven in Thailand. After a series of
secret negotiations conducted by the SIS Station in Bangkok, a joint Thai-
Malay intelligence centre was set up at Songkhla, just over the Thai frontier,
where information on the insurgents could be exchanged. This important
development, combined with an agreement allowing Commonwealth forces
to chase insurgents up to twenty miles into Thai territory, sealed the Eate of
the Communists. They were unable to escape the security forces, and the
Royal Navy patrols off the coast ensured that they could not be resupplied
from Ehe sea. In short, they were trapped.
In July 1955, a general election was held as a first step towards a new
constitution, and the MCP was left even more isolated. Turku Abdel Rahman
was elected Prime Minister and the British Cabinet confirmed that he would
lead his country into independence. One of his first decisions was to issue an
amnesty for all MCP members not guilty of any aiminal acts. This announce-
ment seems to have prompted the elusive Chen Ping to come to the conference
table, for he made contact with the Special Branch and a preliminary meeting
was held with Ian Wylie to agree a suitable venue for the main talks. The site
chosen was a tin mine at Baling. On hand to escorE Chen Ping out of the
jungle, on Z8 December 1955, was his old Force I36 commander, John Davis,
by then a senior officer in the Malay Police. The historic meeting lasted two
days, with Chen Ping demanding that the MCP be allowed to participate in the
new political processes of Malaya. But the Prime Minister, always a firm anti-
communist, insisted on unconditional surrender. No agreement was reached,
so Davis took the guerrilla leader back to the fringe of the jungle, where the
struggle was continued by a diminishing number of Chen Ping's supporters.
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Malaya 1948-57 49
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Although Malaya was granted independence on 31 August 1957, the
Emergency was not formally ended until 1960. Its toll was 3,149 Communists
killed, 915 captured, 752 surrendered and around 1,643 wounded. The security
forces suEEered 1,438 killed (including 353 British personnel) and 2,299
wounded. Chen Ping is still believed to be at large, probably smarting over
one betrayal above all: in April 1957, his chief lieutenant, Hor Lung, took a
reward of ?55,000 and the promise of a new life to sell out his comrades.
As has been seen, the Malayan episode largely involved MIS personnel,
with SIS having a peripheral involvement from Singapore and, of course,
from the neighbouring stations at Bangkok and Rangoon. Nevertheless, the
Emergency became the principal preoccupation of the JIC's Far East sub-
committee, on which SIS sat, in the persons of Dick Ellis, Maurice Oldfield
and his successor at the end of tie active period, James Fulton. In addition,
SIS also attended the British Defence Co-ordination Committee (Far East) and
was, therefore, directly involved in the events in Malaya. It could be argued
that the Bangkok Station's brilliant achievement in the creation of a joint Thai-
Malay intelligence centre at Songkhla was one of the breakthroughs which
enabled the campaign to end in success.
In intelligence terms Malaya's real contribution was to prove that, given
adequate resources and the proper command structure, the security authorities
could gain the upper hand in a conflict against home-grown insurgents who
might otherwise be expected to be at an advantage against 'foreign occupiers'.
There were, admittedly, special factors working in Britain's favour, such as the
political initiative taken by the Cabinet to ensure the succession of a pro-
British, moderate administration. Tunku Abdel Rahman was not the ideal
choice of the local advisers, but he rose to the occasion and proved to be a
leader who commanded considerable respect. Templer s determined promotion
of the concept of a strictly Malayan political process effectively cut the ground
from under the MCP, because the Communists could not pretend to be the
only movement committed to ending colonial rule. Nor could the MCP be
portrayed as the population's natural protector against British oppression.
Many of the forces deployed in the Emergency were Commonwealth troops
from Fiji, Australia and elsewhere, with the full backing of their respective
governments. Templer made it clear that the country would only be ready for
full independence when the terrorist afro?ties had ended. Thus, the MCP
itself unwittingly became an obstacle in the path of its own stated objective.
By the end of the Emergency, when the country had been granted full
independence, the MCP had become an irrelevance without any political
power-base, alienated from both the Chinese community and the rural peasants.
The depth of knowledge achieved by the local Security Service and the
Special Branch, with SIS's help, was truly astonishing. An enormous amount of
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50 The Friends
information was accumulated about each individual terrorist and sympathizer,
which was used to great effect in the military holding centre where suspects
underwent interrogation. The 'menu' system of graded financial rewards linked
to the stature of captured Communist terrorists was also a tremendous incentive
for defectors to trade really valuable intelligence.
There is certainly a temptation to draw parallels between the situation in
Palestine and the Malaya Emergency, considering that the opposition on both
occasions were partly SOE-trained in the first place and that many of the
British police personnel were deployed in both places. That, however, is the
limit of the similarities. Although the Haganah was quite confident that the
British would eventually pull out, it was uncertain about the terms. Withdrawal
was never a real issue in Malaya, because the principle of independence for
Malaya as a sovereign nation had been conceded at a very early stage. The
chief difference between the two conflicts, and the key to the intelligence
victory, was the willingness of the population to assist the security authorities.
This never occurred in Palestine, where both Arabs and Jews were equally
ready to shoot at British soldiers.
The Malayan campaign was a tremendous boost for MI5 and SIS, with
both organizations claiming great credit after a somewhat sticky start. Many
of the lessons Teamed were to be used to good effect again in Cyprus, where
nationalist aspirations fuelled terrorism, albeit on a smaller scale, just as
conditions in Malaya were returning to normal. But before examining the
security and intelligence operation conducted there, we should return for a
moment to SIS's London headquarters, which, during the period just covered,
had found itself embroiled in a highly secret scandal that was to become
known as the Philby affair.
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Kim Philby and VALUABLE
The British security and intelligence services, the oldest and most experienced
in the West, were gravely damaged by Blunt, Philby, Blake and others who
worked for Soviet intelligence inside them for many years before being
discovered.
Communist leaders appreciate the importance of good security work to their
survival and to the constructive contribution that good intelligence can make
to the success of their international strategy. Communist intelligence and
security services are therefore free from the difficult, if not impossible,
constraints imposed on the activities of their counterparts in democratic
countries. They have an officially recognized and honoured place in Communist
institutions. They have no problems to contend with from the press or public
opinion in their own countries. They can afford to be more aggressive,
especially in the recruitment of new agents.'
Anatoli Golitsyn, Ncw Lies for Old'
So much inaccurate information has been written about Kim Philby and,
indeed, his supposed chances of becoming CSS, to say nothing of his alleged
responsibility for the failure of numerous operations, that it is worth stating
the facts again.
Harold Adrian Russell Philby was born in the Punjab on New Year s Day
1912, the only son of Hang St John Philby, a revenue assistant in the Indian
avil service. His mother, Dora Johnston, was the tall, red-headed daughter of
a Eurasian who worked in the Indian Public Works Department. Nicknamed
Kim, after Rudyard Kipling's famous hero, young Philby was brought up in
England by his paternal grandmother, the widow of a Ceylon tea planter. He
was educated at a prep school in Eastbourne and then won a scholarship to
his fathers old public school, Westminster. Early in 1929, Philby won another
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prize, having come top of the three Westminster entrants for his Father's old
college, Trinity, Cambridge.
Philby went up to Trinity in October of the same year to read history, but
three years later ended up with a good second-class degree in economics.
Immediately after graduating he drove to Vienna on a motorcycle, where in
February the following year he married Litzi Kohlmann, a Jewish Communist
slightly older than himself.
Late in the spring of 1934, Philby brought his wife back to London, where
they lived with his mother at the family home in Acol Road, Maida Vale. He
supported himself as a freelance journalist, contributing articles to various
literary magazines. His marriage to Litzi lasted just four years and, in 1937,
she moved to Paris; Philby then travelled to Spain, where he began sending
a series of unsolicited articles from Franco's Nationalist camp to The Times.
Several were printed and, following one particularly impressive despatch from
the Basque town of Guemica, soon after the Luftwaffe had devastated it, Philby
was summoned to London and appointed The Times's special correspondent.
Philby continued to cover the Spanish dvil war until Franco's victory,
remaining in Madrid until August 1939, when he returned to London. After
three weeks' holiday, he was posted by The Times to the Arras headquarters
of the British Expeditionary Force as a seasoned war correspondent, but was
evacuated from Boulogne following the Nazi offensive in May. He made one
further, brief return to France, to Cherbourg, before establishing himself in his
mother's basement flat in Grove Court, Drayton Gardens, with his new
girlfriend Aileen Furse.
Philby's first official contact with British intelligence was when he was
interviewed for a job at the Government Code and Cipher School, SIS's pre-
war cryptographic organization. He was fumed down, but by the end of July
1940 he had secured a post with SOE as an instructor at its principal training
centre, Brickendonbury Hall, near Hertford. From there he progressed to Lord
Montage's estate at Beaulieu, where he lectured potential saboteurs about the
clandestine manufacture of propaganda and subversive material.
It was not until September 1941 that Philby was invited to join SIS's Section
V, where he could put his knowledge of Spain to good use. Known as SIS's
counter-espionage department, Section V was divided into geographical sub-
sections; Philby's new post, V(d), headed by Dick Brooman-White, required
the analysis of secret intelligence which originated from that most sensitive
of sources, intercepted enemy signals. Based at Section V's war quarters in
St Albans, Philby became acounter-intelligence specialist, concentrating on
German decrypts. By sorting through the Abwehr's intercepted communi-
cations, he could spot the names of enemy spies and advise SIS's men in the
field on how to anticipate and counter German moves in an area of Europe
L
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Kim Philby and VALUABLE 53
that had become a veritable cockpit of international intrigue and espionage.
Philby excelled in the exploitation of this most secret source and proved adept
in the construction of summaries, which concealed the true nature of their
origin, for distribution to SIS's four stations in Iberia: Lisbon, Madrid, Gibraltar
and Tangier. He demonstrated all the qualities required of an intelligence
bureaucrat, exactly the kind of individual the Service would need when peace
eventually materialized.
In 1943, Section V moved to Ryder Street in London and Philby, who had
taken charge of V(d), was given temporary responsibility for the whole of the
Section while its new head, Colonel Felix Cowgill, visited America. Late in
1944, he was transferred across St James's Park to the seventh floor of
Broadway Buildings to run a relatively new, anti-Soviet unit, Section IX,
leaving his school-friend from Westminster, Tim Milne, in charge of Section
V, which also happened to employ Philby's younger sister, Helena. Section IX
had been formed in September 1944 under the aegis of an old MI5 hand, Jack
Curry, with the former Head of Station in Shanghai, Harry Steptoe, as his
principal assistant. Steptoe had been selected to make a tour of the Medi-
terranean stations to rebuild SIS's organization after the invasion of Italy,
before becoming Head of Station in Tehran. Curry was anxious for retirement,
leaving Philby in pole position to execute his take-over and 'sniff the breezes
of office politics'. After SIS's reorganization, to which Philby made an influential
contribution, Section IX was combined with Section V to form R5, of which
he was named the head.
By the end of the war Philby and Aileen had had three children, Josephine,
John and Dudley, and had bought a large comfortable house at I8 Carlyle
Square, Chelsea. Having belatedly obtained a divorce from Litzi, Philby married
Aileen in September 1946, just a few weeks before the birth of their fourth
child, Miranda. Five months later, in February 1947, the entire family moved
to Istanbul, where Philby had been posted as Head of Station, under First
Secretary cover at the Consulate General, in succession to Cyril Machray.
Before his departure Philby had attended a short training course, given by
John Munn, and had then briefed his successor at R5, Douglas Roberts.
Philby's uneventful, standard, two-year tour of duty at Istanbul was followed
by an even better appointment -Head of Station in Washington - to fill the
vacancy caused by Peter Dwyei s decision to take up permanent residence in
Canada. Philby handed over the Istanbul Station to an old wartime Section V
colleague, Rodney Dennys, and returned to London to be briefed before
moving into Dwyei s office in the British Embassy on Massachussets Avenue,
where he remained until the defections of Burgess and Maclean in May I95I.
Up until this point Philby was, by SIS standards, a highly successful and
polished operator. But contrary to speculation, there was never any chance of
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54 The Friends
him succeeding Stewart Menzies as CSS. His private life was a complete mess,
with two marriages, three children born out of wedlock and awell-known
Communist past. Certainly, MI5 had a record of Philbys pre-war membership
of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and, in 1946, he had informed
the Vice-Chief, Valentine Vivian, that Litzi had been a Communist activist. He
could not have had any illusions about keeping his Party membership
concealed, for Andrew King, one of his contemporaries at Cambridge and
another rising star in SIS, had attended Party meetings with him at university.
In addition to all this, there was his unconventional father s record, which
had included alive-month spell in prison under the wartime Regulation ISB. St
John Philby had converted to Islam in 1930, and nine years later, after a
lifetime in India and the Middle East, had fought the Epping by-election for
the Labour Party and then the Hythe by-election for the Ear-Right British
People's Party. He was also an Arabist of some note and a close friend of the
Saudi royal family. It was his ignominious deportation from America, while
on his way back to England from India in 1940, that had brought him to MI5's
attention and had resulted in his detention.
St John Philbys fervently anti-British eccentricities, which continued until
his death in Beirut in 1960, did not blight his son's progress as an able, bright,
middle-ranking SIS officer. However, combined with Philbys hard drinking
and Aileen's nervous collapses, the omens for promotion were not good. In
any event, his career came to a swift full-stop in May 1951 when Burgess
unexpectedly disappeared, apparently without trace.
Philby came under immediate suspicion when Burgess vanished for several
reasons. It was perfectly clear, given the circumstances of Burgess's hasty
departure on Friday ZS May, that he had received atip-off from someone who
had been privy to along-standing Security Service enquiry into a leakage of
information to Moscow from the wartime British Embassy in Washington.
Over the four years that the investigation had been running, the field had
been narrowed to just one suspect, Donald Maclean, who had been scheduled
for a hostile interrogation the following Monday, 28 May. The confrontation
never took place because Maclean had fled to France two days earlier, catching
an overnight cross-Channel ferry to St Malo. Obviously he had been alerted
to MI5's intention. Burgess's complicity strongly suggested that, as well as
being an accomplice, he had also been the conduit for the timely warning. The
only question remaining, which was on everyone's lips, concerned the identity
of the 'third man'.
Philby had not known Maclean, but he had enjoyed a long friendship with
Burgess stretching back to their university days together. More recently,
Burgess had lodged with the Philbys in Washington, when they had both
served in the same Embassy. When Philbys Communist past was added to
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the equation, the conclusion was irresistible. Philby was summoned back
to Broadway by Menzies's Deputy Director of Intelligence, James Easton, to
undergo a painful interview with Dick White at MI5's headquarters. This was
followed up by a second session, which resulted in a detailed report being sent
to Menzies stating that Philby had not been entirely candid; the Security
Service recommended that his services should be dispensed with forthwith.
Menzies evidently found it difficult to hand out this kind of treatment to a
colleague he knew and liked, so Philby's enforced resignation was mooted and
accepted over two visits to the CSS's office. The financial settlement, in lieu
of pension, involved an immediate severance payment of fZ,000 and a further
?2,000 paid in four half-yearly payments. Six months later, in November
1951, a formal enquiry into the Burgess and Maclean defections was conducted
by MI5, and Philby was invited to give evidence to it. In reality, the so-called
'judicial enquiry' was little more than a concentrated effort by (Sir) Helenus
Milmo, MI5's skilled wartime interrogator, to extract a confession before
witnesses from the most probable candidate for the Soviet 'mole', or 'third
man'. Milmo's inquisition failed, to the extent that Philby conceded nothing,
but his poor performance satisfied all those present about the scale of his guilt.
Philby endured a few more interviews with Jim Skardon, the ex-Scotland Yard
detective who had persuaded Klaus Fuchs to admit to being a Russian spy,
and then had one final meeting with Sir John Sinclair, Menzies's successor
as CSS. Philby neatly avoided making any incriminating statements and,
reluctantly, the Security Service was obliged to let him walk free.
Philby was now out in the cold. He moved to a small bungalow called
Sunbox, at Heronsgate in Hertfordshire, and looked around for a new job. At
one stage he flew to Spain, calling on the Head of Station in Madrid, Desmond
Bristow, for a drink Like all the European Heads of Station, Bristow had been
ordered to keep clear of Philby, but he could not bring himself to abandon an
old colleague. Instead, he entertained Philby and then sent a detailed report
to Broadway.
While Philby wandered, apparently seeking employment as a journalist, his
wife Aileen bought a large house, Leylands, in Crowborough, and went
into a lonely decline. She needed constant psychiatric care, apparently quite
convinced that her husband was trying to kill her. She eventually succumbed
to influenza in December 1957, when Philby had finally got a job as a Fleet
Street stringer in Beirut.
Philby's name is now a by-word for duplicity, yet for all the wisdom of
hindsight, there were few clues to his true allegiances and certainly no evidence
against him of the kind which could be brought before a court. He fitted neatly
into the Bohemian, Left-orientated circle of intellectuals from which most of
Britain's secret warriors were drawn; even his youthful flirtation with Com-
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56 The Friends
munism was by no means unique and served to bolster his anti-Nazi credentials.
However, although some details of his case became known outside SIS during
the early 1950s, the organization closed ranks to prevent any further disclosures.
Many of Philby's colleagues, who had not been indoctrinated into the substance
of the evidence against him, believed he had been unjustly pilloried because
of a few indiscreet friendships. Only a handful of senior SIS officers, who
shared the truth with MI5's molehunters, knew the weight of the case against
him.
Although Philby is now recognized as anarch-traitor, very little is reliably
known about the circumstances of his recruitment to the Soviet cause. He
himself has given three versions of events: one in his self-serving auto-
biography; another in his extraordinary confession to a colleague in January
1963 (see Chapter IZ); and a third in an interview recently with Phillip
Knightley of the Sunday Times.
Philby has been described as being converted by his first wife, Litzi, in the
turmoil of Vienna in 1934, and he himself told Nicholas Elliott, in his type-
written confession, that he had been a willing volunteer then. However, in his
memoirs, he says that he left Cambridge 'with a degree and the conviction
that my life must be devoted to Communisrri.2 Anthony Blunt claimed that
Philby had been recruited by Theodore Maly, a legendary NKVD 'illegal'
who had operated in Britain during the late 1920s and '30s. This may well be
the case, for in January 1988 Philby confirmed:
CM my very last day at Cambridge in the summer of 1933 I decided I
would become a communist ...[Maurice] Dobb [a Marxist economist] gave
me an introduction to a communist group in Paris.... They in turn passed
me on to an illegal underground communist movement in Vienna. My work
in Austria must have caught the attention of the people who are now my
colleagues because almost immediately on my return to Britain in the
spring of 1934 I was approached by a man who asked me if I would like
to join the Russian intelligence service.... I did not hesitate.'
However, when challenged to name his recruiter, Philby replied: 'For oper-
ational reasons I do not propose to name him, but he was not a Russian...:
The full truth of the matter is yet to be determined, but it is possible to
quantify the damage sustained as a result of Philby's activities.
Although it is widely suspected that Philby reported everything he saw
and did to his Soviet controllers, there is some reason to believe that he was
suf6iciently shrewd not to confide wholeheartedly in his NKVD case officer,
however great his intellectual commitment to the Soviet cause. Blunt once
recalled how clumsy exploitation of one of his tips had placed him in jeopardy.
He had alerted his contact to the identity of an MI5 source inside the CPGB.
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'his had been passed on instantly to the Party's General Secretary, Harry
'ollitt, who had expelled the culprit without explanation, leaving the mole to
seduce, correctly, that he had been betrayed. The Security Service had launched
~n internal investigation to find the leak, much to Blunt's discomfort, and he
aad nan owly avoided being compromised. Given Philby's considerable skill
in the field, it is probable that he rationed his supply of information carefully,
and may even have taken the prudent precaution of withholding certain items
in order to ensure long-term protection from his Soviet masters.
It is possible that Philby did not get the opportunity to undergo a really
lengthy, in-depth debriefing until some months after his expulsion from SIS.
There may even have been a greater delay than that if Philby and the Soviets
suspected he was under intensive surveillance and were reluctant to chance
the necessary meeting. Nevertheless, whatever the date of Philby's eventual
debriefing, he must have supplied enough damaging details of the personalities,
stntctwe and operations of the organization to largely nullify its existence.
Unquestionably, his exposwe in 1951 had a devastating effect on SIS. A few
of the older hands, like Valentine Vivian, who had originally brought him into
Section V, had just retired, but others, such as Kenneth Cohen and Cuthbert
Bowlby, who had two and three years to go before retirement, felt bitter at
the betrayal, almost as though their careers had been invalidated. Tim Milne
was also caught up in the backwash and fell under suspicion.
Apart from the important SIS order-of battle information which, it must be
assumed, Philby disclosed to the Soviets, there must also have been a steady
flow of operational material Up until his transfer to Section IX, Philby had
access to only a limited amount of secrets in which his contacts would
have been interested. His daily faze consisted of clues gleaned from German
intercepted signals, which were relevant to the Abwehr s activities in the
Iberian region -hardly the kind of sensitive data that the NKVD would have
regazded as vital. However, he also gained access to SIS's source books, which
revealed details of SIS sources inside the Soviet Union, exactly the type of
information that the Russians would have been extremely interested in. Philby
recalled how he had obtained these top-secret files from SIS's registry:
These held the paficulars and records of SIS agents operating abroad. It
was natural for me to want information on the agents operating in the
Iberian Peninsula, and my pen:sal of the sowce books for Spain and
Portugal whetted my appetite for more. I worked steadily through them,
thus enlarging my knowledge of SIS activity as a whole. When I came to
the sowce book for the Soviet Union, I found that it consisted of two
volumes. Having worked through them to my satisfaction I returned them
to registry in the normal way.`
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58 The Friends
This sounds like a grotesque breach of security, especially as Philby had no
possible 'need to know' about SIS activities outside his own geographical
region. However, the damage was not quite as bad as it might appear, as SIS
had virtually no sources inside Russia to boast of. Apart Erom all the White
Russian emigres, who were of dubious value, there had only been one really
good agent run personally by Harold Gibson.
Gibson, like his brother Archie who was also an SIS officer, was rather more
Russian than English. He had been born in Russia before the revolution and
Russian was his fiat language. He had attended Tunbridge School and fought
in the First World War, before joining SIS and being posted to Istanbul in
1919. Two years later, he transferred to Bucharest and, in 1930, was appointed
Head of Station in Riga. Then in 1933, he met an old school-friend who
happened to be private secretary to the Foreign Trade Commissar (and along-
surviving senior member of Stalin's Politburo), Anastas Mikoyan. Gibson
moved to Prague to run his agent, but contact was broken late in 1940 after
Gibson had been evacuated to London. When discreet enquiries were made in
Moscow, it was discovered that Gibson's agent had been arrested and executed.
It was not until 1964 that Blunt admitted that he had deduced the agent's
identity from an SIS report and had passed the word on to his NKVD contact.
Thus, when Philby came to examine the source books in late 1941, there was
little for him to discover. Indeed, he would have learned that even GCHQ
had been instructed to ignore Soviet signals for the duration of hostilities.
It was only when Section V and Section IX had been combined to form R5,
when Philby had taken on responsibility 'for the collection and interpretation
of information concerning Soviet and Communist espionage and subversion
in all parts of the world outside British territory', that he really became
indispensable to the NKVD. While in his new post, Philby made several
'sorfies abroad during the summer of 1945. He visited France, Germany, Italy
and Greece, partly to reconnoitre the faalities that might be available for
extending SOE's covert war against the Soviet Bloc, and partly to indoctrinate
SIS's field personnel into Menzies's plan for continuing irregular operations
into the peace.
It had long been decreed by a JICsub-committee chaired by Bill Cavendish-
Bentinck that SOE as such would cease to exist after the Japanese surrender,
but that much of its capacity to conduct clandestine operations would be
integrated into a Special Operations branch of SIS under SOE's wartime
leader, Colin Gubbins. In theory, the Special Operations branch was to build
the foundations of astay-behind network in Germany, Austria and Northern
Italy. The contingency plan in the event of a Soviet invasion also allowed for
a permanent skeleton staff that could be mobilized and brought up to Eull
strength at very short notice. Initially, SIS's new branch was only intended to
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Kim Philby and VALUABLE 59
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operate actively in the Middle East, chiefly Iraq and Persia, but Menzies had
other ideas. With the first frost of the Cold War, preparations were made to
foment subversion in the Soviet Union and its more vulnerable satellites. Even
the Foreign Office, ever wary of SIS-inspired adventures, was later to give its
broad approval to action that would 'liberate the countries within the Soviet
orbit by any means short of war s
The targets Eor SIS's ambitious plan to limit Soviet hegemony in the Balkans
centred on Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece, each of which was in
various stages of civil disorder. SOE's Balkans section, under the command of
Brigadier C.M. Keble, had moved, along with part of its Middle East base, from
Cairo to a small Italian fishing village, Torre a Mare, just outside Bari, in 1944.
Its cover was Force Z66, an offshoot of Force 133 which remained in Cairo
until it was disbanded, along with the rest of SOE, at the end of June 1946.
Since it was ex-SOE personnel who were going to be expected to spearhead
SIS's anti-Communist campaign in the Balkans, Philby undertook a lengthy
tour of inspection. His journey in the summer of 1945 took him to visit Charles
de Salis and John Bruce Lockhart in Paris, Monty Woodhouse in Athens and
SOE's outpost in Bari. There he was 'instrumental in getting a pet bugbear
chosen for an airdrop in to Yugoslavia; but instead of breaking his neck he
covered himself with glory'
If Philby intended to make his influence felt in the planning and execution
of secret missions into the Balkans, he did not do so at this early stage of the
peace. When one of Menzies's Deputy Directors, General Sinclair, offered him
the post of Machray's successor in Istanbul, he undoubtedly had good reason
to believe that he would still be able to take a hand in matters as 'Istanbul was
then the main southern base for intelligence work directed against the Soviet
Union and the sodalist countries of the Balkans and Central Europe'.' Philby
also had another motive for going to Turkey. He knew that his lack of overseas
SIS experience would be a severe handicap in his future manoeuvrings. As he
later confirmed, 7 could not reasonably resist a foreign posting without serious
loss of standing in the service, and such loss of standing might well have
prejudiced my access in the long run to the sort of intelligence I needed.'8
With these expectations Philby must have been a little disappointed when
he was instructed, shortly before his departure for Istanbul at the end of
January 1947, 'not to concentrate too much attention on the Balkans'. His 'first
priority was the Soviet Union'9 and, accordingly, he spent much of his two-
year tour of duty engaged in a topographical survey for SIS's War Planning
branch of Turkey's bleak frontier with Georgia and Soviet Armenia, leaving
the management of individual agents to Roman Sulakov, the station slong-
serving, White Russian assistant who had been recruiting and running spies
in the region for at least two decades.
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Philby has often been credited with mastemlinding the well-informed counter-
insurgency measures taken by the Communist regime in Albania, but in
reality he was not made privy to the details of SIS's intended assault until he
had reached London, en route for his new post as Head of Station in Washington.
Philby left Istanbul at the beginning of September 1949 and took up his new
post in the middle of the following month, having arrived in New York aboard
the SS Caronia on 8 October. During a series of numerous briefing sessions
at Broadway, he was informed about SIS's officially authorized response to
the Communist coup in Prague, the Soviet-inspired civil war in Greece and
the ruthless blockade of the western sectors of Berlin. He was also told that
SIS had finally been allowed to execute a plan that had already been more
than two years in the making: the overthrow of Enver Hoxha's hated regime
in Albania, codenamed Operation VALUABLE.
The first stage in the operation was then just getting under way under the
command of Harold Perkins, who had conducted the sabotage of the Haganah's
illegal refugee ships three years earlier. Perkins had recruited a training officer,
David Smiley, and acquired the use of a strategically located base camp named
Fort Benjimma, not far from Mdina, Malta s ancient capital, where volunteers
from the sizable Albanian emigre community could be put through their paces
before being infiltrated back to their homeland.
At that time, in May 1949, Smiley was with his regiment, the Royal Horse
Guards, in Germany. He was a professional soldier who had joined SOE in
Cairo in 1943 and had been into Albania twice to fight with the partisans. The
first time he walked overland from Greece; the second he was parachuted
straight in. After the war, he had been posted to the SIS Station in Warsaw,
but the Polish authorities had declared him persona non graEa for spying. On
his return to London, he had declined an offer from Bernard Fergusson to join
his counter-terrorist unit of the Palestine Police and had joined Perkins instead.
At the end of his secondment, he returned to regular soldiering as second-in-
command of his regiment.
The SIS plan to destabilize Albania was no hit-or-miss affair, as it has
sometimes been portrayed. It was a comprehensive project proposed by men
who had actually spent months inside the country with the very groups who
were seeking to overthrow the Communists. Apart from Smiley and Perkins,
who were aclmowledged experts in their trade, SIS selected career officers
who knew all the risks from personal experience: The Hon. Alan Haze,
for example, a veteran of two SOE parachute missions into Albania; John
Hibberdine, who had spent months up in the north of the country organizing
guerrilla bands before he had succumbed to paratyphoid; Anthony Northrop,
who had been one of SOE's liaison officers with the headquarters of Hoxha's
resistance movement; Professor Robert Zaehner, an Oxford don and linguist
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Kim Philby and VALUABLE 61
who had spent much of the war working undercover for SIS, dressed as a
local tribesman in Soviet-occupied territory in N6rthem Persia; and Peter
Kemp, a survivor of the Spanish civil war and numerous raids on the French
coast before being parachuted into Albania with an SOE mission. Even the
tricky political negotiations, which had to be held with the exiled leaders
opposed to Hoxa before any of the emigres could be recruited, were conducted
by another old Albanian hand, Julian Amery.
This was no madcap scheme, but one that involved much research into the
backgrounds of the first batch of thirty raw recruits from the displaced-persons
camps in Europe, and the acquisition of suitable transport and radio bases. The
Head of Station in Athens, Pat Whinney, who had run SIS's flotilla of fishing
boats in the Western Mediterranean during the war, was called upon to
provide the transport. He arranged the purchase of a felucca, the Stormie Seas,
and recruited two skilled seamen, John Leatham and Sam Barclay, as crew.
Both had worked for the British Military Mission in Athens, running supplies
into Piraeus during the civil war. Alan Hare manned a secret wireless station
in the Villa Bimbelli, the Greek royal family's seaside retreat in Corfu, over-
looking the Albanian coast.
The operation began in earnest in mid-July 1949 when the first Albanian
volunteers arrived in Malta from Italy, having been Aown in by the RAF on
a flight organized by Cyril Rolo from the Rome Station. They had been living
in the refugee camps dotted around Naples and all had impeccable political
credentials. Some had already proved their opposition to the Communists by
fighting with the resistance before trekking over the mountains to Greece. The
Greeks, ever wary of their neighbours to the north with whom they were still
officially at war, invariably expelled them to Italy, where they languished as
stateless persons, providing SIS with an ideal pool from which to select
guerrilla fighters.
Yet with all these preparations, the one commodity in short supply was
money. Attlee's Labour Government had demanded austerity to rebuild the
war-shattered British economy, and SIS felt the pinch like everyone else. There
was very little foreign exchange available and the main condition imposed on
the Albanian exerdse was the requirement of financial backing from the
Americans. One of those charged with selling the idea to the US State
Department was William Hayter, then Chairman of the JIC. He had Aown to
Washington with- ahigh-powered Foreign Office delegation to sell the simple
idea that the Soviets would only be persuaded to cease their encroachment
on Europe if the West struck back at a suitably vulnerable ally, demonstrating
the intrinsic weakness of the Soviet Bloc satellites. Once bitten in Albania, so
the theory went, Moscow would hesitate before escalating the struggle in
Greece.
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62 The Friends
Receiving the delegation at the State Department had been Frank Wisner,
a former Wall Street lawyer from Mississippi, who had been appointed to the
Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) in September 1945. In reality, the OPC
was a covert operations branch separate from, but funded by, the Fledgling
CIA. Wisner was a determined Anglophile (he had had his son educated in
England), who had headed the Office of Strategic Services' base in Istanbul
before taking a detachment to Bucharest at the end of the war. As the Assistant
Secretary of State for the Occupied Areas, before the creation of the CIA,
Wisner had seen the first manifestations of the Cold War. It had left a lasting
impression, so that when he was offered the chance to participate in the
Albanian operation, he grabbed at it and assigned James McCargar to protect
OPC's investment.
. The first infiltration of Fort Benjimma-trained agents took place on the night
of 3 October 1949, when nine well-equipped exiles were rowed ashore on the
ICaraburun peninsula, in the south of the country. It was not until 12 October
that Hare received his First radio report, which was far from encouraging. One
group of five men had gone to earth, hiding in a cave, because of intensive
military activity in the area, and the others had either been killed or captured.
Apparently, they had struck out on their own, heading north, but had been
ambushed. Of the participants of this first operation, only four eventually
made it safely to the Greek border.
Meanwhile, a second infiltration was under way, using the Stormie Seas
again to land a team of eleven exiles, all armed to the teeth. They went ashore
in the Gulf of Valona on 10 October and completed their mission without too
many mishaps. They then slipped across the frontier into Greece, where they
were temporarily imprisoned by Greek border guards. Rollo Young was
despatched from the Athens Station to extricate them and escort them back
to Malta for debriefing.
These preliminary, reconnaissance missions were intended to guage local
feeling about the regime and to test reactions to the suggestion of a more
ambitious scheme, involving many more men and much more money. The
survivors from the first two operations gave a reasonably optimistic report of
their encounter with the villagers they met, but they suspected that they had
been betrayed. Claims of betrayal are often made by agents after such an
experience, and case officers conducting debriefing sessions invariably dismiss
them as excuses for poor tradecraft. This is what happened on this occasion.
It was conceded, however, that the Albanian security forces had certainly been
on the alert, but this was put down to an inddent the day after the second
landing when the Stormie Seas had actually been fired on by Albanian sentries.
There could be no question of reusing the Stormie Seas, as it was correctly
assumed that it would have been compromised under interrogation by whoever
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had been captured from the first mission. Accordingly, the ~elucca's crew were
assigned to Istanbul, where they concentrated on running agents through the
Black Sea to Bulgaria. Preparations were also made for a third mission, overland
from Greece.
Certain factions within the Greek authorities were willing collaborators in
the undertaking, because Pat Whinney had taken the precaution of bringing
several of his most influential contacts, including the police chief and the head
of the Greek intelligence service, into his confidence. Ever since Monty
Woodhouse had reopened the SIS Station in Athens after the liberation, the
British had been given complete freedom to operate from Greek territory,
much of which anyway had been controlled by British peace-keeping troops.
Indeed, several key members of the Govemment and the security apparatus
had been recruited by SIS in Cairo during the war. However, discretion was
essential because, even if Hoxha's regime was toppled, as intended, there was
no guarantee that its replacement would be any the less hostile to the Greeks,
who were, after all, the Albanians' traditional enemy.
The third mission, comprising of six exiles, began in July 1950, but the first
attempt to get them over the border failed when a group of unfriendly Greek
intelligence officers intervened. The six were detained, but Robert Zaehner
managed to obtain their release and place them in a safe-house in Kifissia, on
the outskirts of Athens, until the operation could be reinstated.
Owing to political problems the six were unable to start again for two
months, during which Zaehner and Whinney's deputy, Frank Stallwood, tried
to keep them under wraps. In order to ensure that there were no slips-ups the
second time around, an additional organizer, Dayrell Oakley-Hill, was recruited
to assist. Before the war he had served in King Zog's gendarmerie, which was
largely staffed by British officers, so at least he was able to communicate with
'the pixies', as the Albanian volunteers had come to be known, and make them
behave, pending their departure. He also escorted them as close as he was
allowed to the Albanian frontier before sending the group back into their
homeland, where they stayed for two months.
After these first three operations, which were judged to be a limited success
with quite acceptable losses, the training camp in Malta was scaled down and
fumed fiver to Anthony Newman, who was sent out from Broadway. David
Smiley returned to his regiment in Germany. However, the Americans were
determined to continue and set about drawing up a much grander plan.
Frank Wisnefs concept of engaging and detaching the Soviet satellites was
nothing if not ambitious. Everything was done to a grand scale. The Albanian
volunteers were put into American uniform, given a fictitious military des-
ignation as a labour corps, 'Company 4000', and sent to an isolated compound
at Wachterhof near Munich; in reality, they were trained as parachute saboteurs
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at Kaufbeuren and Bad Wiessee. The first mission of Eour emigres were flown
from Athens in an unmarked plane to their dropping-zone by Polish aircrew
on 19 November 1950, but they were ambushed by the security forces soon
after landing. Orily two escaped, who gradually made their way north to
Yugoslavia, recruiting and training small bands of monarchist partisans on the
way. When they eventually reached the Yugoslav frontier, they gave them-
selves up. It would be years before Tito allowed them to leave.
In the nine months that followed, more agents were prepared for infiltration.
The CIA made desperate attempts to contact the groups formed by their first
two survivors, but in vain, so three new teams of four men each were sent in
on Z3 July 1951. This time none escaped. Ten were killed within hours of
landing and the remaining two were captured, taken to Tirana and tortured
before being made to participate in a show trial.
The court proceedings opened on 10 October with no less than ten
defendants, including the two wounded survivors of the first US-sponsored
mission, the two from the second and ten other agents who had been rounded
up during the course of the year. All made abject confessions and were reported
to be in extremely poor condition, but that did not prevent the well-publicized
spectacle from lasting nearly a fortnight. At its conclusion just two were
sentenced to death, but none ever emerged from prison. Furthermore, the
Albanian secret police took their revenge on the families of those identi-
fied as having taken part in the missions by liquidating all their known
relatives.
Incredibly, even while Radio Tirana was broadcasting the details of each
day's revelations from the court, a third US mission was despatched. That,
too, suffered losses immediately upon arrival with two of the company being
killed by the security forces, who appeared to have surrounded the dropping-
zone. The remaining three fled east to Yugoslavia, where they had to evade
more patrols before eventually reaching Greece. A report describing their
experience, plus the Radio Tirana transcripts of the trial, finally persuaded the
CIA to call off the pazachute missions.
David Smiley had returned to Germany 'very downcast and completely
mystified as to what had gone wrong ;10 and Philby later recalled that 'the
operation was quietly dropped without having made any noticeable dent on
the regime in Tirana'.'i However, there is no particulaz reason to believe that
Philby played any sinister role in the Albanian fiasco. He has said that 'the
operation, of course, was futile from the beginning',32 but he has never claimed
to have been instnunental in ensuring its failure. He was certainly aware of
the initiation of the British programme shortly before the insertion of the first
mission back in October 1949, but he had been aboard the SS Caronia, in mid-
Atlantic, when the operation actually took place. On that occasion two agents
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were captured, but on the second mission every man returned safely. That is
hardly evidence of betrayal.
According to Smiley, Philby 'made several flying visits to Greece and Italy,
and though he does not admit it in his book, he was quite certainly telling the
Russians all the details of the operations I was running from Malta, and no
doubt the Russians were passing everything on to Enver Hoxha.'" However,
it could easily be argued that with two 'pixies' in custody, the Albanian secret
police had little need of tips from Philby via the KGB. The two captives are
known to have succumbed to torture, which would have compromised rather
more directly useful information than Philby could ever have acquired on his
'flying visits'.
In retrospect, it has to be conceded that, despite the precautions taken
during the Albanian operations, security was relatively lax. There could have
been leakages of information from within the very divided Albanian emigre
community in Italy, or from Malta or Athens. The political and religious
differences of 'the pixies' were the sources of constant unrest. Some were
monarchists, utterly committed to King Zog; others wanted to overthrow
Hoxha so that he could be replaced with a democratic republic. Many of the
Factions were as opposed to each other as they were to the Communists. They
were also typically Balkan when it came to the blood feuds which dominated
particular families. Betrayal was a way of life, as might be expected in a country
where Islam confronted Christianity and hostilities between different groups
had been continuing for decades. In short, although a brave few were deter-
mined to end Hoxha's regime, there was never sufficient motivation among
the exiles to get them to bury their differences and combine to fight a common
enemy. Even King Zog, when-first approached in Cairo to endorse the
SIS/CIA-sponsored Free Albanian Committee, refused to co-operate on the
grounds that it contained anti-royalist elements. As if all this was not enough
to make a complex situation even more complicated, Albanian agents were
known to be operating in some strength in Italy and could easily have exerted
a hold over many of the exiles who had left members of their Family behind.
Therefore, although Philby may have been a convenient scapegoat, there
were plenty of other explanations available Eor the venture's lack of success.
Certainly, it would have stood a better chance if either Yugoslavia or Greece
had given some measure of support to the operation, such as providing safe
haven. In the event, 'the pixies' knew that even if they managed to evade
Hoxha's secret police, they would receive a hostile reception if caught by
either the Yugoslav or Greek authorities. While SIS and the CIA could secure
their release from Greek hands, a Yugoslav prison looked much the same as
an Albanian one, and just as impossible to organize the extraction of a prisoner.
Although not exactly doomed from the start, the SIS planners were guilty of
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exaggerating the amount of support 'the pixies' could expect from the local
population after landing. This, of course, is understandable; their own experi-
ence had been limited to organizing guerrilla parties against the Nazi
occupation. The task of persuading villagers to take up arms against Tirana
had been rather underestimated.
Where Philby unquestionably inflicted heavy casualties, and wrecked a
really promising opportunity to carry the Cold War right into the Ukraine,
was on the joint Anglo-American attempt to build and support a partisan
movement deep inside the Soviet Union.
The person chosen to conduct the campaign was Stepan Bandera, the
extremist leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist Revolutionaries.
Based in Munich, and taking money from both SIS and the CIA, Bandera
supplied a steady stream of willing recruits for the CIA's training centres at
Kaufbeuren, Bad Wiessee and Landsberg. Also located in Munich was the
National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), which boasted its own inde-
pendent espionage school at Bad Homberg. In Frankfurt, the British supported
the General Russian National People's Movement, which accommodated the
older generation of White Russians. All three movements were essentially
fronts which produced agents for the CIA and SIS, but each was equally
penetrated by the KGB.
Ukrainian exiles who were considered suitable for infiltration back into
Russia were recommended by Bandera for SIS's intensive agent training course
run by Peter 'rollis at a special school in Holland Park London. They also
attended the main facility at Fort Monckton, outside Gosport, before being
transferred to Cyprus, where the RAF arranged for clandestine flights to be
made across Soviet territory. The first insertions took place immediately
following a joint SIS/CIA planning conference organized by the Controller
Northern Europe, Hany Carr, and held in London in April 1951. Three six-
man groups were parachuted into the Ukraine, but none were ever heard of
again. Nor did the Americans have any better luck They flew drops into the
Ukraine from Greece, but few of the parties managed to transmit a short
prearranged 'safe-arrival' message on their shortwave radios. Even the agents
who were slipped aaoss the Baltic on H: H. Klose's E-boats from the joint
SIS/British Naval Intelligence outpost on Bornholm fared badly. Of the handful
who did acknowledge signals, most were believed to be operating under
Soviet control. This appallingly high rate of failure is not entirely surprising,
given Philby's recollection that, 'in order to avoid the danger of overlapping
and duplication, the British and Americans exchanged precise information
about the timing and geographical co-ordinates of their operations. I do not know
what happened to the parties concerned. But I can make an informed guess.'1`
The Ukrainian disaster ruined Harry Carr, who had mastemlinded the entire
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Union by reawakening their nationalist passion failed in large measure because
of Philby's intervention. Whether it would have had more of a chance of
success without him, or whether it was doomed anyway, like the Albanian
fiasco, is an impossible question to answer.
Whatever else Philby achieved, he ruined his Chief, Stewart Menzies, who
had led SIS since November 1939, and ensured that, to a greater or lesser
extent, the careers of a good number of his colleagues had been invalidated.
It has been alleged that Menzies never accepted Philby's guilt and was
obliged to accept his resignation in 1951 because of political pressure, following
the defections of Burgess and Maclean, and leverage from MI5. Once again,
this is a claim propagated by Philby. However Philby's close association with
Burgess was, in Menzies's eyes, a sufficient indiscretion to preclude him from
SIS. Nevertheless, the Chief must have been shattered by the possibility,
whether he believed it or not, that Philby, star of the old Section V which had
done so much to recover SIS's shattered pre-war image, could have been a
wrong 'un. Whatever he thought, and he confided in no one, Menzies only
waited a few months before submitting his resignation to the Foreign Secretary,
Anthony Eden, at the end of June 1952 and recommending his Vice-Chief,
John Sinclair, as his successor. The formalities over, Menzies took his recently
The attempt to destabilize the forty-five million Ukrainians in the Soviet i
KimPhilbyand VALUABLE 67
operation and spent most of his career, which dated back to the North Russian
expedition in 1919, fighting the Bolsheviks. He opted for a Field post, as Head
of Station in Copenhagen, in 1955 and eventually retired in 1961. Shortly
before his final departure hom Broadway, Moscow produced a booklet entitled
Caught in the Act identifying twenty-three agents who had been captured and
claiming that 'only an insignificant fraction of cases can be listed here'.
In spite of Philby's duplicity, the emigre recruitment programme was not
entirely wasted, judging by the lengths the KGB went to in order to eliminate
the exile leadership. The details are known because two professional assassins,
Nikolai Khokhlov and Bogdan Stashinsky, defected. Khokhlov's target had
been Georgi Sergeivich Okolovick, the NTS leader who had previously been
the victim of an abortive kidnapping; but instead of carrying out his assignment,
Khokhlov fumed himself in to the CIA in Frankfurt in February 1954. He
identified several other KGB agents and only narrowly escaped death himself
when he was surreptitiously injected with thalium in September 1957 while
attending a public conference.
Stashinsky defected in August 1961, two years after he had fired an
exploding cyanide capsule into Bandera's face on the doorstep of his Munich
apartment. By that time he had already stalked and killed another prominent
Ukrainian emigre, Lev Rebet, outside his office. The defections prompted a
shake-up inside the KGB, but the assassination polity continued.
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acquired third wife, Audrey Hay, down to his country house, Bridges Court,
in the Wiltshire village of Luckington, to spend his retirement hunting with
the Beaufort.
Menzies kept out of the limelight until late in 1962, when his name and
wartime role was published for the first time by H. Montgomery Hyde in The
QuieE Canadian.'S The revelation caused a small sensation, with questions asked
in the House of Commons (where Hyde had sat as the Unionist MP for North
Belfast until 1959), but the furore soon died down. Menzies seemed not to
take any notice, because virtually everyone in his narrow circle of polite
society (his clubs were White's, Boodles and the Turf) had always known that
he had 'run the Secret Service'. Even though he was informed when Philby
finally confessed to having been a Soviet spy in January 1963, Menzies made
no public comment, and his death in May 1968 prevented him from being
hounded by Philby's vitriolic memoirs:
He was not in any sense of the words a great intelligence officer. His
intellectual equipment was unimpressive, and his knowledge of the world,
and his views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly
cloistered son of the upper levels of the British establishment. In my own
field, counterespionage, his attitudes were school-boyish -bars, beards
and blondes.16
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Cyprus 19 5 5-6 0
'If you were to take British information priorities after World War II, where
quick accurate intelligence influenced decisions at government level, you
would have to include Palestine, Malaya, Suez, Borneo, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden,
Ulster and the Falklands. Much of the information in these "small wars" was
supplied by two-legged spies.'
John Bruce Lockhart, Intelligence: A British View'
The Cyprus Emergency, which was formally declared in November 1956, had
its origins in a secret meeting held between a young cleric named Michael
Mouscos and Colonel George Grivas in Athens in July 1952.
In 1950, the charismatic, American-educated Mouscos had been enthroned
as Archbishop Makarios III, leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus.
For several years, as the Bishop of Kition, he had been in the forefront of
the popular campaign for enosis, political union with Greece. Grivas shared
Makazios's Cypriot background, but had spent his cazeer in the Greek army.
After the army's defeat by the Nazis, he had organized aright-wing resistance
movement known as 'X', which had ruthlessly prepazed for the return of the
monarchy at the end of the war by murdering members of the Greek Com-
munist Party. At one stage of the civil war, Grivas had been extricated from
almost certain death by British troops, but this incident had not affected his
opposition to the British presence in Cyprus. He was totally committed to
enosis and, in October 1952, had obtained a visa from the British Embassy in
Athens for a brief visit to Cyprus. His purpose was a thorough reconnaissance
of the island in preparation for a series of guerrilla attacks on British instal-
lations.
Cyprus had been under British control since 1878, when Disraeli had
acquired the island from the Turkish Ottoman Empire for Queen Victoria.
During the First World War, Cyprus was offered to Greece in return for a
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declaration of war against the Kaiser, but King Constantine had backed the
wrong horse. In 1925, Cyprus became a Crown colony, but Greek Cypriot
support for enosis continued to grow.
It was Gamal Abdel Nasser's demand for the return of Britain's base in the
Suez Canal zone (see Chapter 9) that transformed Cyprus's rather dubious
strategic value. On 28 July 1954, the British Government announced the
withdrawal of its troops from Egypt and the transfer of the British Middle
East Headquarters to Episkopi. Henry Hopkinson MP, Oliver Lyttelton's junior
minister in the Colonial Office, had responded to a Parliamentary Question
by confirming that Britain would never change Cyprus's colonial status, thus
dashing Greek hopes for enosis. When challenged about self-determination,
Hopkinson had stated that Cyprus 'can never expect to be fully independent',
and thereby lit a fire which would engulf the island.
The loss of the Canal zone and Anthony Eden's desperate gamble to recover
it are dealt with later, but overnight Cyprus acquired a strategic importance
that it had never enjoyed before, even though it boasted only a limited number
of airfields and had no deep-water harbour. From the intelligence viewpoint,
Cyprus had been designated the new home for SIS's regional base, then led
by George Young, the former head of R6 (the economic requirements section)
who had become Controller Middle East in 1951 in succession to John Teague.
Young's busy empire originally took in the SIS stations at Beirut, Tel Aviv,
Amman, Baghdad, Jeddah, Tehran, Basra, Damascus, Cairo and Port Said, and
enjoyed good relations with SIME's parallel organization of Defence Security
Officers and Security Liaison Officers, then headed by Bill Oughton from RAF
Fayid, outside Ismailia. Oughton had two representatives in Cyprus: Fitz
Fletcher, the SLO at the High Commission in Nicosia, and Gerald Savage, the
DSO at the Combined Middle East Headquarters at Episkopi. Under normal
arcumstances their tasks would have been routine. Instead they found them-
selves in the midst of an emergency made all the more complicated by the
Suez fiasco.
In antiapation of trouble, MI5's Director of E Branch (the overseas section),
Bill Magan (himself a former head of SIME), had sent Phillip Ray to Nicosia
to organize local intelligence. Ray began by creating a Special Branch within
the CID and appointed George Meikle to non it. The Branch's first success,
based on information supplied by a seaet SIS source, occurred on 26 January
1955, when HMS Comct intercepted a caique, the Ayios Georghios, off the
coast of Khlorakas and confiscated 10,000 sticks of dynamite. Thirteen Cypriots
were an ested, including Sokratis Loizides, an Athens-based lawyer and enosis
activist who had been deported from Cyprus and banned from re-entry four
years earlier.
All thirteen prisoners were interrogated at Paphos Prison, but they claimed
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O Ktima
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to be fishermen who had smuggled the dynamite for peaceful purposes. This
story only lasted until naval divers brought up boxes of guns and ammunition
that had been jettisoned shortly before the Camet had appeared. When Loizides
was convicted of gun-running, he was sentenced to twelve years' imprison-
ment, which he served at Wormwood Scrubs and Maidstone.
Any complacency about having dealt enosis a crippling blow was quickly
dispelled. On the night of 3I Mazch, sixteen bombs went off across the
island. The Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation's transmitters at Athalassa and
Lakatamia outside Nicosia were attacked, as was the radio tower at Wolseley
Barracks. The Episkopi power plant was sabotaged and explosives went off
close to two police stations in Limassol and the CID headquarters in Lamaca.
Even the heavily guazded secret wireless interception base at Aghios Nikolaos,
home of the No. 9 Signal Regiment, was rocked by a bomb. Another device
was left neaz a hotel in Nicosia soon after the departure of the Governor, Sir
Robert Armitage. Beside it was a number of leaflets from the self-styled Ethniki
Organosis Kyprion tlgoniston (National Organization of Cypriot Combatants)
or EOKA. They were signed by 'Dighenis', the name of the Greek medieval
hero. It did not take the Special Branch long to discover that Dighenis was
the nom do guerrc adopted by Grivas.
In June, EOKA struck again: a grenade was thrown at Sir John Stemdale
Bennett, head of the recently arrived British Middle East Office. By this time
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Ray had returned to London and had been replaced as the Co-ordinator of
intelligence by an MI5 officer. The political atmosphere was deteriorating and
members of the CID and the Special Branch were becoming the subject of
calculated EOKA intimidation. Three Greek Special Branch officers were shot
during the summer. One, Herodotus Poullis, was on routine surveillance duty
at a Communist rally in Ledra Street, Nicosia's 'murder mile', on 28 August.
His attacker, Michael Karaolis, was caught fleeing the scene and became the
first EOKA assassin to be sentenced to death. He was hanged in Nicosia
Central Prison on 10 May 1956.
The greatest disaster of the summer was the escape of sixteen EOKA
leaders From a makeshift detention centre in Kyrenia Castle, of whom only
seven were ever recaptured. The incident was a painful reminder of the
island's inadequate security arrangements and served to give a tremendous, if
unexpected, boost to EOKA morale.
On 25 September, the British Government responded to the escape by
replacing Armitage with the CIGS, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. He took
personal charge of security and, in a vain attempt to reduce leaks of information,
shipped in 300 British police officers. He knew that the indigenous police Eorce
harboured many EOKA sympathizers, or victims of EOKA threats, and that
even the Special Branch had been penetrated. George Lagoudontis was one
of several Greek Cypriot officers who gave regular reports about the Branch's
operations to EOKA contacts. In spite of Harding's efforts, the incidents
continued.
Six soldiers were killed during October and November, compelling the
Governor to declare a State of Emergency. This announcement on 25
November coinaded with the detention of 100 EOKA suspects nominated
by Meikle's Special Branch. Twelve thousand troops were placed on alert and
Turkish Cypriots, from the minority section of the community which composed
just eighteen per cent of the population, were brought into the police. New
regulations were enforced which included a mandatory death penalty for the
possession of fire-arms, life sentences for sabotage, collective fines on whole
towns and a ban on strikes. By the end of the year, twelve British servicemen
and twelve Cypriots had died in the violence.
Armed with the new emergency powers, the Speaal Branch rounded up
hundreds of EOKA suspects and questioned them at a series of purpose-built
interrogation centres. At the height of the conflict, some 4,500 police and
28,000 troops were engaged in security duties, although EOKA probably
never fielded more than two or three hundred terrorists. An information fund
totalling f 150,000 was set up to encourage informers and, gradually, evidence
mounted of a direct link between Makarios and the elusive Grivas. Not all the
informers were paid. One of the best 'hooded toads' who pointed out EOKA
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activists while concealing his own identity was a prisoner serving a life teml
for discharging afire-arm. In return for his valuable help his sentence was cut
to nine years in prison in England, but he was secretly released after just
eighteen months.
Makarios, of course, denied having any links with EOKA and continued
to negotiate for enosis with Harding; but when his palace was searched, the
Special Branch found what it believed to be signs of a hastily evacuated arms
cache. However, the best proof of Makarios's illicit support Eor Grivas came
in February 1956, when a company of men from the 3rd Battalion, the
Parachute Regiment, ambushed an EOKA group near the Kykko monastery.
Codenamed PEPPERPOT, the lengthy operation was centred in the Troodos
foothills, an area identified as an EOKA stronghold by an informer named
Pascalis. During the five-week search, Grivas literally went underground and
moved into a collection of rough hides hewn out of the mountainside, which
offered perfect concealment. Although Grivas himself narrowly evaded the
paratroops, he entrusted his diary to Pascalis, who promptly sold it to his
Special Branch contact. This remarkable document had been kept by Grivas in
case he should ever fall out with Makarios and gave a detailed account of
how the two leaders had conspired together and planned EOKA's campaign
of assassination and terror. It was an extraordinary lapse of security, apparently
born out of mutual mistrust, and it provided damning evidence of the Arch-
bishop's involvement with EOKA. On 9 March, Makarios was due to fly to
Athens for consultations with the new Prime Minister of Greece, Constantine
Karamanlis, but when he reached the airport at Nicosia his party was guided
to an RAF transport aircraft. Once aboard he was served with a deportation
order and flown to Mombasa in Kenya, where he was transferred to a Royal
Navy frigate for exile on Mahe, the largest of the remote Seychelles Islands
in the Indian Ocean. The following day, Harding outlined the evidence that
had been accumulated against Makarios. It consisted largely of information
gleaned from the incriminating Grivas diaries, but the Director of Intelligence
insisted that the exact source should not be compromised.
With Makarios quarantined, the security pendulum seemed to swing against
EOKA. Grivas was constantly on the nin throughout the summer of 1956
and, on ZO August, more of his diaries were recovered from abiding-place in
afield near Lyssi. This second batch of indiscreet documents proved even more
incriminating than those sold by Pascalis. They showed Grivas's complicity in
no less than twenty-five murders, all believed to be EOKA informers. Despite
protests from the Speaal Branch (now headed by Bill Robinson, a former
Indian police officer from the Punjab), Harding decided to publish the Grivas
diaries in the hope of alienating him politically. The Special Branch was furious
at having lost what it saw as a golden opportunity to trap Grivas. According
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to the most recent entry in his diary, Grivas intended to move into the home of
someone who also happened to be a police informer. Not surprisingly, when
the Governor disclosed the existence of the diaries, Grivas failed to turn up.
At first it seemed as though Harding had succeeded in his objective of
isolating Grivas, who called a truce and moved his secret headquarters away
from the mountains and into a tiny room excavated under a house in Limassol.
Only a couple of his most faithful EOKA couriers were entrusted with its
exact location, which happened to have been used as a British army billet. But
at the very moment that Harding seemed to be gaining the initiative, Eden
embarked on his disastrous invasion of the Suez Canal zone, obliging the
forces engaged on security duties in Cyprus to withdraw. just as the tide
had changed against EOKA, so it suddenly reversed its course. Always an
impressive strategist, Grivas launched a renewed campaign of violence and
intimidation which, during November alone, involved some 4I6 separate
incidents. Harding responded by ordering more detentions, bringing the total
held to 693, but by the end of the year the statistics had escalated alan~ningly:
IIS Greeks and eighty-one Britons had been killed, compared to just twenty-
four for the previous year.
Following Eden's resignation as Prime Minister in 1957, the Cabinet decided
to release Makarios from detention and let him return to Athens to begin
negotiations again. His first step was to order Grivas to cease operations, but
this manoeuvre was interpreted in Ankara as the first step in a British sell-out
to the Greeks. In fact, EOKA was in considerable difficulties, especially after
Grivas's prindpal lieutenant, Gregoris Afxentiou, had been betrayed for (5,000
and killed by troops in a cave. The imposition of a truce was actually quite
convenient for EOKA, but it alarmed the Turkish Government, which, fearing
,the worst, started to ann VOLKAN, the Turkish Cypriot taunter-terrorist
organization. The Turks had been perfectly willing to accept British rule, but
the moment the new British administration, under Harold Macmillan, showed
signs of wanting to go back on Hopkinson's commitment to the word 'never ,
Ankara had taken an increasingly aggressive position against future Greek
domination of the island, which, geographically, was only forty miles away
from Turkey's coast. Turkish anxieties were fuelled in December 1957 when
Harding, who had been so tough on EOKA, had hanged nine convicted
terrorists and had recruited so many Turkish Cypriots into the police, was
replaced as Governor by Sir Hugh Foot, a colonial avil servant but also a
member of a family with strong Leftist sympathies. Foot's stated intention of
finding his own constitutional solution to the bitter conflict between Cyprus's
two communities only aggravated the security situation, which deteriorated
towards civil war. For many, partition looked like the only acceptable answer
to an intractable problem.
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By 1958, the level of violence had reached a peak, with 130 Greek Cypriots
killed in the daily confrontations with the security forces and the Turks; thirty-
nine Britons were also killed, including an MI5 officer who was shot in the
back in Famagusta. EOKA's campaign was not only aimed against the Turks
and Special Branch informers. Many of those murdered were left-winger and
trade unionists whom Grivas wished to eliminate before the anticipated power
struggle took place following British withdrawal. The British response was a
reorganization of the security apparatus, with (Sir) John Prendergast brought
in from Kenya, where he had masterminded the suppression of the Mau-Mau
rebellion, to take over a new co-ordinating post of Chief of Intelligence. A
tough Irishman, Prendergast had been in the Palestine Police and had also
been seconded briefly to SIME in the Suez Canal zone in 1952. Supporting
Prendergast was Philip Kirby Green (known as 'K-G'), one of Britain's most
remarkable secret warriors, who had joined the Royal Navy and served in the
1st destroyer Flotilla in the Graeco-Turkish War in 1922. Since then he had
been an officer in the Merchant Navy and had spent ten years in the Metro-
politan Police, before joining MI5 in 1942. For the rest of the war, he was
DSO in Gibraltar and had then been posted to the Caribbean as MI5's SLO.
Prendergast and K-G were a formidable team and, with Magan's support,
they devised a joint MI5-SIS scheme codenamed Operation SUNSHINE to
trace Grivas to his hiding-place and eliminate him. John Wyke and Peter Wright
made all the technical arrangements, which included placing surreptitious taps
on Makarios's private telephone, while (Sir) Stephen Hastings was transfeaed
from the Paris Station to be 'in at the kill'. Hastings, who was to be elected
the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire in November 1960 immediately
after leaving the Friends, enjoyed a daunting reputation and had been
decorated with the Military Cross while serving with the SAS in 1944. An
old Etonian, he had joined SIS in 1948 and completed atwo-year tour at the
Helsinki Station before moving to Paris in 1953. He was an experienced case
officer and ran an agent who had been recruited from inside Makarios's
immediate entourage. SUNSHINE also involved afall-back plan, which
developed out of the evidence that was accumulated of the Archbishop's rather
unusual homosexual proclivities. However, before SUNSHINE could be
executed it was scrapped because, against all the odds, the politicians began
to make progress.
Secret negotiations between the Greek and Turkish Foreign Ministers
opened late in 1958 at the United Nations, following one of the many
stalemated votes taken on the issue, and continued into February the following
year at Zurich, where a political agreement was almost reached. However, just
when the Greek and Turkish sides thought they had reached a settlement,
Makarios intervened at the signing ceremony in London and withheld his
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consent. Both the Greek and Turkish delegations protested that Makarios had
been a party to every stage of the agreed compromise, but he would not
budge. Reluctantly Selwyn Lloyd, who was chairing the conference, agreed to
extend it for an extra twenty-four hours so as to allow Makarios to reconsider
his proposed 'modifications'. After a night alone in his suite at Claridge's,
Makarios returned to Lancaster House the following morning and told the
Foreign Secretary that he had decided to relent. At last he was ready to confine
the terms previously agreed. Exactly what occun ed to persuade Makarios to
change his mind and co-operate has never been revealed, but it is known that
he made no attempt to contact Grivas to get his advice. One possible
explanation for the Archbishop's uncharacteristic reversal is the likely impact
the disclosure of the material that had been gathered during SUNSHINE
relating to his private life would have had in Cyprus. There he was revered
by tfie greater part of the island's population as a political leader and churchman.
Any revelation about his homosexuality would have been terribly damaging,
as he was well aware.
Makarios's change of heart meant Cyprus would gain independence, with
a guaranteed role for the Turkish minority in the political framework, but no
enosis. Britain would retain sovereignty over two of the principal bases on the
island and pay rent for the others. It was brinkmanship on an astonishing scale,
but it did achieve a temporary end to the bloodshed. Grivas, who had been
excluded from the deal, was given a safe conduct to Athens, where he was
welcomed as a hero; his EOKA supporters were granted an amnesty.
At the polls in December 1959 Makarios was elected President and, in
accordance with the new constitution, Dr Fazil Kutchuk, the Turkish Cypriot
leader, was appointed Vice-President. In August 1960, Cyprus became an
independent republic and Polycarpos Georgadjis, one of EOiCA's most
resourceful members and the organization's district leader in Nicosia, was
appointed Minister of the Interior in charge of police and security. He knew
something of his assignment for he had been among those who had escaped
from Kyrenia Castle back in September 1955. He had been recaptured, but
had escaped again, this time from a hospital in a raid during which four others
had been killed. He was caught again for the third time early in 1957 in the
home of a senior Greek policeman. He then escaped from detention hidden in
a dustbin. Fortunately, Prendergast did not have to stay on the island to deal
with his old adversary. He was posted to Hong Kong to head the Special
Branch there. In his place MI5 sent an officer who had seen active service in
Greece during the dvil war to set up a liaison office in the new British High
Commission.
The Cyprus Emergency hardly compared to the Malayan campaign in terms
of casualties, with only 104 British servicemen, twelve police officers and
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twenty-six civilians killed in total. Paradoxically, EOKA murdered rather more
of its own people (about IIZ Greek Cypriots). The security forces shot just
ninety-seven terrorists.
What made Cyprus so important was the island's strategic value in a post-
Suez empire which had left Britain with world-wide responsibilities, but
precious little resources to service them. With Palestine gone, Suez a smould-
ering memory, Persia overwhelmed by nationalism and the Baghdad Pact in
tatters, Britain required solid bases from which to defend its interests. Cyprus
was far from ideal, but there simply were no alternative sites in the region;
the prospect of two large sovereign bases, plus additional facilities for gathering
signals intelligence, must have seemed extremely attractive, even if it did take
months of exasperating negotiations for the minister directly concerned, Julian
Amery, to tie up all the details with Makarios.
The key to the Cyprus success, which it certainly was, lies in the brilliant
work done behind the scenes in Athens by the Head of Station, Christopher
Phillpotts, and his CIA colleague, Al Ulmer. Phillpotts used chazacteristic
initiative to mount a series of highly productive operations of a nature that
are still too secret to be be disclosed, while Ulmer and his staff bought
influence by adding senior members of the Greek administration to the payroll.
Phillpotts, an extremely amiable figure with a gift Eor amateur operatics and
a great knowledge of the theatre, had first come into contact with SIS while
operating patrol boats in the Channel during the war. His complaints about
the unusual craft slipping in and out of the Helford River at night had ended
in his own recruitment in SIS's private navy. To impress those who, like
himself, had once doubted SIS's usefulness, he invariably quoted the oft-told
story of how Menzies's predecessor, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, had once
forced Baldwin to return to Parliament to coaect a misleading statement he
had given about Gem1an air-force strengths earlier the same day. Sinclair had
threatened to resign unless the Prime Minister had acted and the incident had
convinced Phillpotts of SIS's value.
Together Ulmer and Phillpotts used quiet, undercover diplomacy to convey
a straightforward message to the Greeks: if they pressed for enosis, it would
mean waz with Turkey and the possible breakdown of NATO. It was
only when Constantine Kazamanlis's advisers were convinced of Turkish
determination and Turkish militazy superiority that a solution was reached.
The element that enabled Britain to adroitly guide both sides to Lancaster
House was Phillpotts's technical sources of infomlation, which more than
compensated for the loss of so many individual agents to the Americans who
enjoyed bigger budgets. These same sources ensured that the Royal Navy
maintained an effective blockade to prevent EOKA from receiving supplies
by sea and enabled the security forces to keep Grivas pinned down. In 1957,
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Phillpotts was rewarded with a CMG and promoted to the Paris Station,
where he remained for an unusually long tour lasting five years; his place in
Athens was Eilled by Alan Hare, who was able to capitalize on his groundwork.
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Buster Crabb OBE GM RNVR
'In the modem age there are many contrivances for overlooking or overhearing
the proceedings of others. Peeping Toms and flapping ears have gadgets
never thought of before.'
Anthony Eden, Full Circle'
?
By any standards 1956 proved to be a catastrophic year for SIS. The first
disaster occurred on Saturday ZI April, when Colonel Grimshaw, SIS's com-
munications specialist, reported the collapse of Operation PRINCE to the
Head of Station in Berlin, Peter Lunn.
Operation PRINCE was a technical project involving a tunnel dug from
Rudow in the American sector of Berlin to an underground cable conduit in
the East, which housed the main telephone landlines of the Soviet military
headquarters in Karlshorst. The exercise was a repetition of Operation LORD,
which had been conducted in Vienna in 1950 by John Wyke, SIS's technical
expert, under the direction of Lunn, who had been the Head of Station in
Vienna before moving to Berlin. LORD had been a great success, as had its
commercial cover at the shaft head a textile shop selling original Harris tweed
imported from Scotland. The tunnel had been dug From the basement of the
shop, which was located in the suburb of Schwechat, to a junction box beneath
the busy road outside. The tapped line gave access to all the communications
that passed between the old Imperial Hotel, which had been requisitioned by
the Red Army for its headquarters, and Moscow. On that occasion, Lunn
had been forced to abandon the commercial cover because it had become
embarrassingly popular and had attracted too much attention. Nevertheless,
the project had continued from a large mansion nearby, where Wyke had been
installed in the guise of a rich, retired, expatriate army officer.
PRINCE was a similar undertaking, but on a much larger scale, and was
completed with American assistance. Grimshaw's partner had been Bill Harvey,
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the legendary hard-drinking, gun-toting former FBI Special Agent who was
the CIA's Station Chief in Berlin. His collaboration had led to the operation
being nicknamed 'Harvey's hole', but he had secured the use of an American
radar station as a convenient location from which to sink the shaft.
PRINCE had produced a huge quantity of raw intelligence, in the form of
telephone intercepts which required time-consuming transcription and analysis;
this was also undertaken on a joint basis by SIS and the CIA. Exactly how
the existence of the tunnel was discovered by the Soviets was not known in
April 1956, but it later emerged that Grimshaw's deputy, who had been
responsible for supervising the tunnel's logistic support, was George Blake, a
long-teml Soviet mole. It had been his job to gather the sophisticated recording
equipment needed to tap the Russian lines and monitor their performance. He
had also acted as secretary for the Berlin Station's liaison committee, which
had managed the day-to-day running of the tunnel with the Americans.
The toss of PRINCE was a great blow to Broadway and provided the
Soviets with an enviable opportunity to make propaganda. Certainly, they
wasted no time in inviting journalists down the tunnel to inspect the undeniable
evidence of foreign espionage. However, just as Broadway was absorbing the
news Erom Berlin, there was another, even more serious, debacle which was
to have appalling consequences for everyone.
Once again, the origins of the incident, which was to become known as the
Crabb affair, went back some years to the development of Section R3, SIS's
naval liaison unit. In the immediate post-war period, the section had lost
control over Frank Slocum's private navy, which had instead been taken over
by the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division. Its principal target was, of
course, the Soviet Union, but because of hostile surveillance the Naval Attache
in Moscow had little chance of gathering any really useful information and
was rarely allowed to visit a Soviet port. On the few occasions he did so, he
was under tight escort. Accordingly, the naval section developed its contacts
with members of the merchant navy and, in particular, with shipping companies
that regularly had vessels visiting ports of interest. Frank Slocum had been
the SIS regular in charge of these activities, but in 1954 he had been appointed
to Oslo as Head of Station. His successor was Ted Davies, a former RNVR
officer who had served with Pat Whinney and Christopher Phillpotts in
Slocum's wartime private navy.
In the mid-1950s, the Soviet navy was relatively small and its movements
could be plotted with ease, both by 'shadowing' at sea by submarines, surface
vessels and aircraft, which was carried out by NATO navies and air forces,
and by signals interception. There was, however, an additional need to monitor
Soviet technical developments so as to remain one step ahead in the complex
area of electronic counter-measures. Whenever an opportunity presented itself,
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Buster Crabb OBE GM RNVR 81
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efforts were made to take radar profiles of Soviet warships so that an up-to-
date index of the fleet could be maintained. Attempts were also made to take
acoustic recordings of every Soviet warship at sea, and it was not unknown
for clandestine hull surveys to be carried out. Most of these undertakings
involved virtually no risk. For the recordings to be made a submarine was
simply placed under the intended path of a Russian ship. The radar profiles
involved rather more preparatory work, with special equipment moved into a
secure location close to where the target Russian ship was going to come into
range.
Just such an operation had been completed in October 1955 when the
Soviet auiser Sverdlov had docked in Portsmouth Harbour. Radar equipment
had been installed in a huge, secret, nuclear bunker hewn out of the chalk
under Dover Castle, and its bulky antenna fixed on one of the galleries half-
way up the cliffs. Scarcely visible from below, the galleries held generators
and the bunker Bair-conditioning plant, and provided an ideal vantage-point
from which to capture the Sverdlov's radar image. A submarine was positioned
in the Channel exactly where the cruiser was expected to pass, and a covert
hull inspection was arranged once the warship had docked at Portsmouth.
The diver selected to cant' out the Admiralty's underwater mission to check
the cruiser's hull for tell-tale 'blisters' used to house sonar equipment and to
measure the pitch of the propellors was Commander Lionel Crabb, known to
his friends as Buster. Crabb was an extraordinary, almost legendary, figure in
the diving world who, paradoxically, was a poor swimmer. Now in his mid-
Eorties, and constitutionally somewhat the worse for an excess of alcohol and
cigarettes, he sported a monocle and swordstick and cut a somewhat eccentric,
if broken-down, figure. During the war he had volunteered for bomb disposal
work and had been posted to Gibraltar in 1942, where he had pioneered
methods of clearing enemy limpet mines from merchant vessels. Italian midget
submarines and frogmen had preyed on the Mediterranean convoys and many
ships had been lost until an Underwater Working Party had been created to
inspect every Allied and neutral ship. Using very rudimentary breathing gear,
converted from the submarine escape kits issued to submariners, Crabb had
become an accomplished diver and an expert in underwater bomb disposal
and salvage work He had also won the George Medal for removing an
unexploded torpedo head from beside a troopship. The nature of his unusual
job brought Crabb into contact with MI5 and SIS, which both maintained
wartime offices on the Rock, and Slocum s navy, which operated a few feluccas
in the region for landing agents into occupied France. It was through this
personal contact, which was kept up after the war, that he was commissioned
to do one-off tasks for SIS. Crabb was demobbed in 1948, but soon afterwards
was employed by the Director of Boom Defence and Marine Salvage to assist
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82 The Friends
on the development of underwater cameras. He was then seconded as a
technical adviser to the Admiralty Research Establishment at Teddington.
There, according to his biographer, Marshall Pugh, he 'began to dive, to
photograph wrecks in harbours, to help salvage divers before they began; to
film the behaviour of underwater weapons and equipment; to experiment with
new cameras, new lights, new breathing equipment, new diving suits. Most
of the work was secret and important.'Z Equally secret was his part-time work
for Slocum, which may have involved clandestine hull surveys in Soviet
harbours operating from submarines.
Whatever Crabb's unofficial activities while based at Teddington, it is known
that the last few months of his service until the end of his contract in March
1955 were spent at HMS Vernon, the Royal Navy's shore base in Portsmouth
and the headquarters of the Admiralty's Underwater Counter-measures and
Weapons Establishment. He had anticipated an attachment to the Iraqi navy
as an adviser, but instead had taken a job with a friend, running acoffee-bar
furniture business. He also kept up his freelance diving, going down to
Portsmouth for the Sverdlov operation in October 1955, and again in April
the following year.
This second operation was to examine the hull of the Soviet cruiser
Ordzhonikidze, which docked in Portsmouth on IS April with Nikita Khrush-
chev and Marshal Bulganin aboard. It was almost as though the Sverdlov
had been a rehearsal, and virtually everyone concerned in the plan regarded
it as a non-risk venture. Since the operation was in direct breach of a directive
prohibiting any clandestine operations while Khrushchev and Bulganin were
in England, and the episode was to go so disastrously wrong, it is worth
looking in detail at the role' of all those involved.
The chief planner was Ted Davies, who worked out of the London Station,
then headed by Nicholas Elliott. The Station was located in a large, nondescript
office on the east side of the Vauxhall Bridge Road, not far from Victoria. It
was unique because it conducted operations within the United Kingdom,
almost as though it was located in a foreign country. In many ways it mirrored
an overseas station, running agents and operations in the immediate territory
as well as providing a base for activities in Europe, but it had a heavy bias
towards technical fadlities because of the coverage needed for all the diplomatic
missions in the capital Indeed, much of the rear of the building was taken up
by a huge telephone intercept and transcription centre, which automatically
recorded every call in and out of virtually every embassy in London. The
authority for the entire programme was an annual warrant signed by the
Foreign Secretary for each target country, whatever the number of telephone
lines involved. In order to ease difficulties of jurisdiction with the Security
Service, the Station boasted a permanent liaison officer, John Henry. Elliott had
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Buster Crabb OBE GM RNVR 83
along background in intelligence, having been recruited originally by MI5;
he had worked briefly in its German double-agent section during the Phoney
War before switching to Section V of SIS. He had spent most of the war as
Section V's representative in Gibson's Istanbul Station before going to Berne
in 1947. Four years later, he had retumed to London as Chief of Production
(CPR) before being assigned to the London Station. Elliott's immediate superior
at Broadway was the Director of Production for Europe, or DP-1, a fomler
parachute officer. Between the DP-1 and the higher echelons of the CSS,
Sinclair, and his newly knighted Vice-Chief, Easton, was the Foreign Office
Adviser, (Sir) Michael Williams.
Williams's anomalous post had been created in April 1942, when severe
criticism of SIS's structure had led to a regular diplomat, (Sir) Patrick Reilly,
being seconded to Menzies with the title of Assistant Chief Staff Officer. In
reality, Reilly was the direct link between the CSS and the Foreign Office,
giving political guidance where necessary and ensuring that the Government's
policy on sensitive issues was correctly interpreted. He had been succeeded
by another diplomat, Robert Cecil, but at the end of the war the post had
lapsed. It was only in 1950, when Reilly retumed to the intelligence community
as Chairman of the JIC, that he saw the dangers of Menzies's organization
nu-ning potentially controversial operations without proper authority. He
therefore recommended the reinstatement of a Foreign Office Adviser. The
first post-war nominee in the job was (Sir) George Glutton, a Former First
Secretary in Belgrade and latterly Head of the Foreign Office's African Depart-
ment. His appointment to SIS in 1952 followed atwo-year stint in Tokyo as
head of the UK's liaison mission to Japan. It was only discovered some years
later that he was a homosexual and was suspected of having been the victim
of a Soviet blackmail attempt. In 1955, he was appointed British Ambassador
to Manila, and his place in Sinclair s hierarchy had been taken by Williams.
Williams had been educated at Rugby and Trinity, Cambridge, before
joining the Foreign Office in 1935. He had served abroad at Madrid, Rome and
Rio de Janeiro prior to his transfer to SIS in 1955. When the question of Davies's
plan for the Ordzhonikidze had been raised early the next year, it had been
referred by Elliott to Williams for his approval. But instead of consulting the
Permanent Under-Secretary, or the Chairman of the JIC, he had simply given
it his sanction. Apparently, he had done so because he had been 'faced with the
Crabb scheme at the end of an exceptionally hazd day, during which his father
had died'' His father, the Rev. Frederick Williams, had died suddenly at home
on 7 April, the very day that Eliott's project had reached his desk. It was pre-
sumed by Elliott and the Director of Naval Intelligence, Reaz-Admiral Sir John
Inglis, that the operation had been given all the necessary cleazances. In Eact it
had not, and the initiative was quite contrary to Eden's directive on the subject.
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On the afternoon of Tuesday, 17 April 1956, Crabb and Davies checked
into the Sallyport Hotel in Portsmouth High Street and spent the following
two nights there. Davies, in fact, suffered a mild heart attack on the Wednesday,
but decided to continue with the operation which was planned for early the
next morning. On 19 April, Crabb dived from HMS Vernon and everything
appeared to be normal. He returned briefly from one sortie under the Smofriash-
chin, one of the cruiser s two destroyer escorts, and, having added some extra
lead weights to his belt, made a second dive from which he never returned.
Davies was in no condition to handle the emergency, but he did manage
to alert the London Station to the fact that Crabb had disappeared. John Henry
promptly drove over to Leconfield House and begged MI5's Director of
Establishments (A Branch), Malcolm Cumming, to intervene. He ordered Henry
and Hugh Winterbom, a member of A Branch, to go down to Portsmouth to
remove any evidence of their connection with Crabb. The two officers went to
the police headquarters in Portsmouth, where the head of the CID, Detective-
Inspector Lamport, was persuaded to visit the Sallyport Hotel and warn the
owner to keep quiet about his two guests. The relevant pages of the hotel
register, bearing the signatures of Buster Crabb and 'Bernard Smith', who had
given his address as 'attached Foreign Office', were removed and a receipt
given.
If the London Station had hoped that the incident could be forgotten, the
Soviets had no such intention. A complaint about illicit divers was lodged
with the Admiralty by the Russians, but the Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth
simply issued a routine denial. This was Followed by a short announcement
on 29 April that Crabb 'is presumed to be dead as a result of trials with certain
underwater equipment'. A little later the same day, after several press enquiries,
the Admiralty added that 'the location was in Stokes Bay',` some three miles
away from the quay where the Soviet warships had been moored. However,
it was the discovery that Lamport had tom out the pages of the hotel register
that really fuelled speculation. Eventually the Soviets joined in, on 3 May, by
leaking the content of an official diplomatic note, in which it was pointed out
that the Admiralty's original denial about the existence of a diver had been
contradicted by the latest admission that Crabb had disappeared while diving.
The Russian protest brought further press speculation, including confirmation
from one of Crabb's friends that he had been engaged to dive under the
Sverdlov the previous October. Questions were raised in Parliament and, very
reluctantly, the Prime Minister, who had only been told the story on 4 May,
made a brief statement:
It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which
Commander Gabb is presumed to have met his death. While it is the
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Buster Crabb OBE GM RNVR 85
practice for Ministers to accept responsibility, Ithink it is necessary, in the
special circumstances of this case, to make it clear that what was done
was done without the authority or the knowledge of Her Majesty's
Ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.s
Eden's attempt to stifle further comment on the affair failed, and a full debate
was held in the House of Commons on 14 May. By that time Eden had asked
the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, to investigate the matter and, after
receiving a preliminary account from Sinclair, who had been on leave at the
time, had commissioned a more searching enquiry from Brook's predecessor,
Sir Edward Bridges. Opening the debate the Labour opposition leader, Hugh
Gaitskell, remarked that 'presumably the Secret Service or a secret service and
the Admiralty must have been mixed up in the plan from the start' ? Eden
replied that 'I deplore this debate and I will say no more', but there were
others willing to do so. Among them was Konni Zilliacus, who suggested that
Crabb 'had on this occasion been employed by the United States Secret Service
with the complicity of their and his contacts in the British Secret Service'.' A
number of Tory MPs with SIS experience contributed nothing to the debate.
Philby's friend, Dick Brooman-White, who had won Rutherglen in I95I, and
had actually spent a year in Turkey when Philby had been stationed in Istanbul,
kept quiet. So did Henry Kerby, the wartime recruit into SIS who had seen
service in Sweden in 1940 and had won the West Sussex seat in March
1954. One Member with intelligence experience who did comment was John
Cordeaux, now sitting for Nottingham Central. He observed that 'it would be
wrong for the House to lose faith in the Secret Service because of this case,
but it was impossible to excuse it. It was approved as mistakenly and rashly
as it was ineptly carried out', and he 'felt alarmed for the higher direction of
whatever service might be concerned. Commander Crabb was of an age when
he should hardly have been chosen for such a hazardous operation.'6
Eden was understandably furious about the taunts he had to endure in the
Commons and about the blatant way in which SIS had ignored his specific
instructions not to engage in any irregular activity while Khrushchev was in
Britain. His retribution was in the form of the official (but secret) Bridges
Report. Bridges interviewed all the principal participants and gave them all a
surprisingly lenient hearing. Davies retired on health grounds soon afterwards,
with generous compensation, and emigrated to the United States. Elliott
escaped all criticism and received a posting as Head of Station in Vienna.
However, Bridges's displeasure was reserved for higher mortals. In his report,
submitted on 18 May 1956, he suggested to the Prime Minister that SIS was
ready for some significant changes.
Eden's action was swift. He allowed Sir John Sinclair the early retirement
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he had previously requested and had the Foreign Office withdraw Michael
Williams, who was transferred to Bonn with the rank of minister. Williams
eventually rose to be Ambassador in Guatemala; his last post was Minister to
the Holy See, before he received a belated knighthood in 1965 and retired
two years later. The Buster Crabb affair had effectively wrecked his career and
ruined Sinclair, who was rumoured, falsely, to have been sacked. Sinclair
retired to East Ashling, near Chichester, and obtained directorships with two
companies: the Universal Asbestos Manufacturing Company and Chinnor
Industries Limited. By rights his successor ought to have been Jack Easton, his
loyal Vice-Chief who had been in the Friends for thirteen years, but at the age
of forty-eight he was considered too young for the post. Instead, Eden
appointed Sir Dick White, the Director-General of the Security Service, as the
new CSS, and imposed a permanent ban on all politically risky covert
operations without a written ministerial sanction.
Much to SIS's eternal embarrassment, the Ordzhonikidze was later sold to
Indonesia and discovered to be entirely devoid of any exotic equipment, either
inside or outside the hull.
Crabb's body, or rather what remained of his torso, was not recovered until
10 June 1957, when a fisherman discovered it on a sandbank in the mouth of
Chichester Harbour. Fom1a1 identification was impossible, but the Pirelli two-
piece rubber diving suit was recognized as one owned by Crabb. An inquest
was held, but there was insufficient evidence for the coroner to determine the
cause of death. Crabb could either have got into difficulties while underwater
on his second dive or, perhaps, had been murdered by Soviet frogmen who
might have emerged from a hatch below the Ordzhonikidze's waterline. The
find reopened press speculation, and Chapman Pincher revealed in the Daily
Exyress that 'Crabb was working for the United States Intelligence Service -
not the British -when he disappeared last year 9 There were to be other,
equally bizarre, theories about this cause celebre. In 1960, a Czech emigre writing
under the pseudonym J. Bernard Hutton suggested in his biography, Frogman
Spy, that Crabb might have been kidnapped by the Soviets. This was a theme
returned to eight years later, in Commander Crabb is Alive, which included
photographs purporting to show Crabb in Soviet uniform talking to a group
of Red Navy sailors. The stories have now entered the mythology of espionage,
but none has any aedence.
However, by the time the first of these claims had been made, White had
taken control of SIS and had had to cope with another crisis, this time of
Eden's own making.
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Operation BOO T
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The British "station" is almost identical with that of the CIA, except, perhaps,
that it is normally smaller, better covered, and better integrated into the embassy
to which it is assigned. Also it is poorer, its budget normally being about a
third of the budget of its American counterpart. For this reason it is in most
parts of the world a primary duty of the British station chief to use his superior
prestige and cunning to persuade his CIA colleague to join him in joint
Anglo-American operations, for which he supplies the brains and the CIA
colleague supplies the funds:
Miles Copeland, The Real Spy World'
The Crabb affair was a bad experience from everyone's point of view. Eden
referred to the incident as 'this sad event', but it was only one of several he
would endure during the coming months. Ahead was the embarrassing public
revelation that Philby's name had been linked in the 'third man' scandal to the
defections of Burgess and Maclean, and the appalling Suez debacle. But before
describing Eden's attempt to overthrow Nasser, we should tum briefly to Iran,
where the seeds of the major crisis in Egypt were to be found.
Iran had long been an area of strategic interest to Britain, not least because
it supplied much of the West's oil through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
(AIOC) refinery at Basra, which was the biggest in the world. The British
Government owned just over half of the company and, in accordance with a
concession signed in 1933, virtually ran Iran's monopolized oil industry,
providing most of the country's income from the AIOC's dividends and a
royalty on sales. At the outbreak of war, the Reza Shah had declared his
country neutral, but that status was ended in 1941 when the Allies invaded
to secure a southerly supply route to the hard-pressed Soviet Union. The Shah
was placed in detention in South Africa and his weak son, Mohammed, put
on the throne leaving Iran under joint Anglo-Russian control. This state of
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affairs continued until 1946, when the Russians failed in their attempt to seize
the country through their surrogates, the Tudeh Party, and reluctantly
withdrew to their own border.
The Soviet withdrawal left Britain firmly in control, but in 1948 the Labour
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, announced that the depressed
economic situation called for greater taxation and a limit on dividends of all
companies. The implications for the AIOC were severe - a considerable drop
in revenue from the dividends -and all pleas to regard the company as a
special case were rejected by Cripps, who pointed out that the company
represented Britain's largest overseas investment and, as such, was a key
financial asset. No exception could be made to the Treasury's dividend rule;
the Iranian economy would just have to cope. This attitude served to harden
Iranian nationalist sentiments which had been exploited for some years by Dr
Mohammed Mussadeq, a vociferous member of the Iranian parliament, the
Majlis, and one of the few local politicians not to have been put on the British
payroll.
Mussadeq used the Treasury's intransigence as another example of Iran's
loss of sovereignty and began pressing for nationalization of the oil industry.
These demands were skilfully resisted by the Prime Minister, General Razmara,
but in March 1951 he was assassinated by a Muslim extremist. Two months
later the Shah reluctantly appointed Mussadeq as his successor. Supported by
huge street demonstrations, Mussadeq announced the nationalization of the
AIOC; the company responded by ceasing its operations, thus bringing Iranian
oil exports to a virtual standstill, apart from the small quantities destined for
Israel and China.
The Labour administration in London found itself in some difficulties. It could
hardly oppose the principle of nationalization, which it had applied ruthlessly
in Britain, but nor? could it simply wave good-bye to the country's largest
overseas asset. To do so without taking firm action to enforce the sanctity of
contracts would invite similar trouble elsewhere in the world where Britain
had important interests. There was a strong desire to settle the matter with
some old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy, but the Americans were convinced
that any British military action in the south would provide the Soviets with
an excuse to invade from the north. The SIS Head of Station in Tehran at the
time, Monty Woodhouse, recalled that '[Foreign Minister Herbert) Morrison
was willing to use force to recover the AIOC's rights and property, especially
the great new refinery at Abadan.... One of my officers had suborned the
Iranian Commander-in-Chief at Khon amshahr not to offer more than token
resistance, so the operation would not have been difficult. But the Cabinet
would not let Morrison proceed.'Z Bowing to US pressure, the contingency
plan codenamed Operation BUCCANEER was shelved.
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The only alternative was a coup to remove Mussadeq from power, and this
was 'first formulated by the Foreign Office itself rather than entrusted to its
so-called Friends'' But even if the original idea did not come from Broadway,
the plan and its execution certainly did. Accordingly, the SIS Tehran Station
in the British Embassy started drafting in suitable personnel. At that time, it
consisted of 'three or four able young men in the Embassy [who] specialized
in intelligence on Iran and the Communists. Another cultivated leading Iranians
who were hostile to Mussadeq. Another conducted a useful liaison, approved
by the Shah, with the chief of the security police, who was well informed
about the Tudeh Party.'? They were John Briance, a former Palestine Police
officer who had been posted to Tehran in 1950; Nomtan Darbyshire from
Cairo, who had done a tour of duty in Tehran at the end of the war and had
been installed in 1950 as Vice-Consul at Reshed on the Caspian; Alexis Forter,
an RAF officer of White Russian extraction, who was sent to open a sub-
station in Basra; and Robert Zaehner, the hard-drinking Oxford don who had
participated in the Albanian fiasco. The Head of Station, Woodhouse, was an
SOE veteran who had won the DSO while fighting with Greek guerrillas (and
was later to become the Tory MP for Oxford); he had been brought in to
head SIS's War Planning Directorate in 1949.
Zaehner was to be one of the cruaal players in the drama that followed,
having spent four years under press attache cover in Tehran from 1943
onwards. During that period he had recruited some important agents inside
both the royalist camp and the opposition. Chief among them were the
three wealthy Rashidian brothers, Seyfollah, Qodratollah and Assadollah, who
exerted considerable influence and were believed by many to own numerous
members of the Majlis, quite apart from their own very substantial holdings.
All three were committed Anglophiles, having educated their children in
England and having bought properties in London.
While Zaehner rallied political support for an acceptable deal with the
AIOC, Woodhouse took care of the logistical back-up any mass uprising
against Mussadeq would need, using RAF Habbaniyah in Iraq as a source of
weapons to arm the royalist tribes. Caches of guns were seaeted throughout
the country to give Mussadeq's opponents confidence and to form the basis
of a resistance movement to deter the Soviets from taking advantage of the
situation. All went well until 17 October 1952, when Mussadeq suddenly
broke off diplomatic relations with Britain and gave all the diplomatic staff
just ten days to quit the country. This, of course, was an intelligence disaster,
because the expulsion requued the evacuation of all the SIS personnel operating
under diplomatic cover and effectively left SIS's agents in the hands of the
CIA station in Tehran. Quite apart from the obvious drawbacks to such an
arrangement, the Rashidian brothers were as anti-American as they were pro-
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British. However, a link was provided in the form of a wireless contact with
RAF Habbaniyah so that communications with the brothers could be relayed
to the SIS station based in the British military headquarters in Cyprus, but
clearly desperate measures were called for.
The first step was a conference in London at which Woodhouse, Zaehner
and Sinclair's deputy, George Young, briefed the new Foreign Secretary,
Anthony Eden, on the deteriorating situation. Woodhouse was optimistic
about the chances of removing Mussadeq, but Zaehner 'gave Eden an
extremely defeatist account of the capabilities of the brothers' s No operations
could be nln without a base in Tehran and, in the absence of a diplomatic
mission, that meant total reliance on the CIA. This presented further difficulties,
because the US State Department had tried to keep a neutral stance over the
oil dispute and was suspected of being more than a little sympathetic to
Mussadeq, who was perceived as a bulwark against Communism and a not
entirely unsatisfactory replacement for General Razmara. The Americans had
always been uneasy about propping up British Imperialism and, anyway,
considered Razmara to have been unusually corrupt, if not actually a Eully
paid-up SIS agent. The US State Department's viewpoint was also coloured
by the inescapable strategic Eact that a British boycott of oil products, or a
Royal Navy blockade in the Persian Gulf, might easily Eorce the Iranians to
tum to their Soviet trading partners across the Caspian Sea.
With Eden's consent, Woodhouse flew to Washington with Darbyshire and
the newly appointed SIS Foreign Office Adviser, George Glutton, to suggest
a joint operation to get rid of Mussadeq once and for all. According to
Woodhouse's own account, he 'decided to emphasize the Communist threat
to Iran rather thin the need to recover control of the oil industry' ? In America,
the SIS delegation was received by the incoming Eisenhower administration's
new Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, and his Station Chief in
Beirut, Kermit Roosevelt. Together they established the basis of Operation
BOOT. All that remained to be finalized was a practical scheme. By February
1953 Young, Woodhouse and a new player, Dickie Franks, had been enrolled.
(A former SOE saboteur, Franks was destined to become CSS in 1978, after
an SIS career spanning thirty years.)
BOOT was finally formulated as Woodhouse describes:
Two separate components were dovetailed into the plan, because we had
two distinct kinds of resources: an urban organization non by the brothers,
and a number of tribal leaders in the south. We intended to activate both
simultaneously. The urban organization included senior officers of the army
and police, deputies and senators, mullahs, merchants, newspaper editors
and elder statesmen, as well as mob-leaders. These forces, directed by the
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Operation BOOT 91
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brothers, were to seize control of Tehran, preferably with the support of
the Shah but if necessary without it, and to arrest Mussadeq and his
ministers. At the same time the tribal leaders were to make a show of force
in the direction of the major cities in the south. If there was any resistance
by the Tudeh Party, the tribes would occupy Isfahan and Abadan.'
As Roosevelt later recalled, the British
brushed aside my reservations and proposed that we have at least a
thorough preliminary talk right then and there. I was dealing at this time
only with Glutton, his principal lieutenant Monty Woodhouse and with
his recently returned head of the Iranian office, Norman Darbyshire. They
had already sketched out a plan of battle and, while they recognized that
we might have political problems, they could see no other reason for delay.
We did take the time to go into their battle plan in some detail. In later
talks the number of participants on both sides would be substantially
increased. But at the beginning it was just the four of us ?
On their second visit to Washington in February 1953, the BOOT team
from SIS was accompanied by Patrick Dean, the Chairman of the JIG. It was
agreed that Mussadeq should be deposed by a military, pro-royalist coup,
which would enable the Shah to name Mussadeq's successor. The only
stumbling-block was the American nominee for the post, General Fazlollah
Zahedi, who had been interned in Palestine during the war for his pronounced
pro-Nazi sentiments. Dean declared the choice 'a bit of a shocker',' but it was
accepted because in spite of his experience Zahedi was not known to be anti-
British; the SIS idea that Roosevelt should be BOOT's Eield commander was
also adopted. In reality, there was not much alternative, because SIS still lacked
any faalities in Tehran.
The first hurdle to be overcome was to obtain the young Shah's consent to
a coup d'etat, so in mid-July Roosevelt travelled undercover to Tehran from
Beirut and made contact with Ernest Person, swell-placed British agent who
was the Shah's Swiss-born private tutor and life-long friend. Roosevelt's initial
overtures failed, as did an attempt to use the Shah's sister, Princess Ashraf, as
an intermediary. Eventually Roosevelt was forced to make a direct approach
by attending a secret rendezvous with the Shah at midnight on 1 August.
Roosevelt presented himself as a personal representative from Eisenhower and
Churchill, explaining that elaborate arrangements had been made to confirm
his credentials: the President had agreed to insert a particular phrase into a
speech he was due to deliver, and the Prime Minister had got the BBC to
alter its usual World Service time signal on its Persian language broadcast;
instead of baldly stating 'It is midnight', which was the usual routine, the
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announcer was to say 'It is now ...', then pause briefly and add 'exactly
midnight'. Eden had been seriously ill during the last vital weeks of planning
and so Churchill had been indoctrinated into BOOT. As Woodhouse later
observed, 'Churchill enjoyed dramatic operations and had no high regard Eor
timid diplomatists. It was he who gave the authority for Operation BOO T
to proceed.'10
The Shah was suitably impressed and, after much persuasion during several
more secret meetings, agreed to do nothing to oppose the CIA's plan. Much
of the credit for gaining access to the Shah and swinging opinion against
Mussadeq was later taken by Roosevelt when, in the opinion of others
involved, it should really have gone to (Sir) Shapoor Reporter, SIS's Bombay-
bom agent of influence in Iran who had served during the war in the Tehran
Embassy as the public relations officer. Reporter was an SIS asset of long-
standing, who had attached himself to the U S Embassy in 1948 as 'political
adviser'." His advice to Roosevelt helped ensure BOOT's eventual success.
Operation BOOT centred on the recruitment of some 6,000 anti-Mussadeq
Iranians, organized by a small, well-equipped group which itself was controlled
by the Tehran CIA station and General Norman Schwartzkop? the US police
adviser attached to the Iranian army. Schwartzkopf allegedly recruited his
armed insurgents (or mob, as others have accurately described them) with
open suitcases of money. The total cost to the CIA has been put at around
$ZO million. The plan called for the Shah to issue an imperial decree, or firman,
which would dismiss Mussadeq and establish General Zahedi in power with
the legal support of the amty. The jrinwutn was to be delivered by Colonel
Nematollah Nassiry, the commander of the palace bodyguard, while the Shah
and his queen flew up to their summer retreat on the Caspian to await events.
If the coup was a success, the Shah would return in triumph to Tehran; if not,
he would simply fly on to a safe haven and issue an ultimatum to his people
requiring them to deade between himself and the increasingly irrational
Mussadeq.
On 13 August, the rabble rook to the streets in a series of violent and
chaotic demonstrations, and Colonel Nassiry led a detachment of tanks to the
Prime Ministei s house. Unfortunately, the plot had been betrayed and Nassiry
was met by a strong force of troops loyal to Mussadeq, headed by the Chief
of Staff, General Raqi Riahi. Nassiry was promptly arrested, but as news spread
of the attempted coup, so the demonstrators crowded back into the streets.
Tehran's radio station denounced the intervention by 'foreign elements', and
the Shah hastily departed for Baghdad before flying on to Rome, where aCIA-
maintained hotel suite awaited him. Meanwhile, in Tehran General Zahedi
went into hiding.
It was at this moment that the US State Department almost lost its nerve.
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Operation BOOT 93
The Under-Secretary of State, Walter Bedell Smith, was alerted to the Failure
of the coup and transmitted a 'get out quick' signal addressed to Roosevelt in
Tehran. However, the CIA station lacked an independent method of contacting
Washington and relied on SIS for all its external communications. Woodhouse,
therefore, managed to intercept the message in Cyprus and declined to pass
it on immediately. The critical delay in the onward transmission of Bedell
Smith's directive gave Roosevelt just enough time to regain the initiative. As
he later recalled, Woodhouse
had faith, or, if one wishes to be cynical, nothing to lose. The British were
totally out of Tehran. The AIOC had lost; no more could be taken from
them. But Beedle [Bedell Smith] did not want the Americans' hand exposed,
particularly in Failure. He assumed that no word from me .was bad word,
and he Eelt that I .should get out. Under the circumstances I can hardly
blame him. Had the message arrived earlier -when, in fact, he first sent
it - I should have had a real problem.'Z
Instead, chaos reigned until 19 August, when it was Mussadeq's turn to
take Fright. The CIA's agents stormed Tehran Radio and broadcast a news
bulletin naming General Zahedi as the new Prime Minister. The announcer
also claimed, equally falsely, that the Shah was on his way back to Iran. The
royalists quickly took to the streets, aided by the police who had been ordered,
somewhat rashly, to crack down hard on the Tudeh protesters. The result was
a violently pro-Shah demonstration that united the Tudeh activists against
Mussadeq. As the Tehran mob approached his house, Mussadeq climbed over
the garden waft and Aed, leaving General Zahedi to emerge from hiding and
take control. A few days later, on 2Z August, he was at the airport in his new
capacity as Prime Minister to welcome the Shah home.
The coup had been completed with hardly a shot fired, but some 300
civilians died, trampled underfoot, when the mob took over Tehran. Mussadeq
was placed under house arrest and later sentenced to three years' solitary
confinement. Colonel Nassiry was released and promoted. In December 1953,
diplomatic relations were re-established with Britain, allowing Dickie Franks
to reopen the SIS station.
Early in the New Year, negotiations commenced so that the oil dispute
could be settled. A compromise was reached: the AIOC changed its name to
British Petroleum and Zahedi's Government signed an agreement with a
consortium of companies in which BP owned forty per cent of the stock; the
remaining sixty per cent was bought by five American companies, with Royal
Dutch Shell and the French taking a small minority interest.
Neither Woodhouse nor Roosevelt stayed long to enjoy BOOT's success.
Woodhouse had already left Cyprus by the time the Shah had been reinstated
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in Tehran and had embarked upon a tour of the Far East, visiting the SIS
stations in Tokyo and Pusan in Korea, before returning to Broadway. He was
actually relaxing at the British Ambassador's residence in Korea when the
news of Mussadeq's fall came through. For his part, Roosevelt caught a flight
out of Tehran the day after the Shah's safe return, having First been thanked
by him for saving his kingdom. On his way back to Washington, he stayed
in London for a couple of nights, installed at the Ritz by Norman Darbyshire.
The next day, a celebration lunch was held by Clutton at the Connaught
Hotel's grill room - 'perhaps the best and most expensive place in London,
so I assumed Clutton must have authorized it as a business expense'" -after
which Roosevelt was escorted to 10 Downing Street, where he perched on
Churchill's bed and gave him 'in glamorous detail the story of what happened'.'i
Roosevelt then continued his journey home and was later to become head of
the CIA's Middle East Operations Division.
Reflecting upon BOOT afterwards, Woodhouse commented:
Of course there were some things we did not plan. We did not plan the
Shah's flight from the scene of action. We did not plan the violence which
cost over three hundred lives. In other respects the course of the revolution
was more or less what we were trying to bring about. It is possible that
events might have taken just such a course without our intervention.15
The entire operation was a triumph of co-operation between SIS and the CIA
and depended largely on the close relationship that developed between the
two partners. There was none of the mutual suspicions that had so marred
previous enterprises, such as the Albanian affair. As Woodhouse remarked in
his memoirs, Something Ventured, published in 1982, 'So far as I know, Operation
BOOT was the first such operation successfully carried out by the Americans,
and probably the last by the British. It was also the only one they ever carried
out together.'16 It had, nevertheless, been aclose-run thing; if Bedell Smith's
Fatal signal had not been deliberately held up in Cyprus, the entire episode
might easily have misfired. As it fumed out, the Shah took a tight grip on the
country and established a security and intelligence organization, SAVAK, to
prevent further instability.
Roosevelt did not wait as long as Woodhouse to give his version of events.
After years of speculation about who exactly had been behind the coup d'etat,
Roosevelt wrote Countercoup and released it in 1979. However, its timing was
less than perfect, for its publication coincided with the seizure of the American
Embassy in Tehran by Muslim revolutionary fundamentalists. It was also
thought to be less than discreet about the exact role played by the AIOC and
its relationship with the Friends. Pressure was applied instantly and the 7,000
copies of the first edition were quickly withdrawn from sale. In a revised
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Operation BOOT
edition all references to British Petroleum were removed, and the names of
Glutton, Woodhouse and Darbyshire changed to 'John Cochran', 'Henry
Montague' and 'Gordon Somerset' respectively. Omitted from both editions
was the unpalatable truth that Glutton was later to be investigated as a
suspected Soviet spy.
Certainly, all the essential ingredients for a coup in Iran were present there
when SIS had initiated its plan. The political will in London was firm, although
with Eden recuperating on a yacht in the Aegean from a bungled gall bladder
operation and Churchill recovering from a stroke, there was little fear of top-
level interference. Glutton had given SIS a free hand during the Labour
Government and, if anything, the policy had become more robust when the
Conservatives came to power midway through the undertaking. Another vital
contribution was Woodhouse's infectious enthusiasm for the project, which had
won support from both the CIA and President Eisenhower s administration.
Although Woodhouse could not claim to have Roosevelt's impressive con-
nections (he was Theodore Roosevelt's grandson), he did have extremely
useful friendships with Churchill and Eden. On the ground, too, the conditions
were very favourable, with widespread resentment that Mussadeq had failed
to live up to his extravagant promises, thus alienating the bazaar, the merchants,
the wealthy middle classes and even his erstwhile supporters, the Tudeh. With
the street mob open to manipulation from adollar-rich CIA station, and the
army and police divided in their support for Mussadeq's eccentric regime, the
coup might have happened anyway, without foreign intervention. The CIA
and the Friends simply gave Zahedi critical support at exactly the right moment
to ensure success.
One essential element in a country where street politics dominate the scene
was the role of the radio station. It was not a lesson lost on SIS, which
had long maintained an interest in psychological warfaze. Officially British
involvement with such matters had ended in 1945 with the closure of the
Political Warfaze Executive. However, two years later Christopher Mayhew,
then Bevin's junior minister in the Foreign Office, had pressed for a reappraisal
of Britain's propaganda effort in the Cold War. His own experience had been
as Hugh Gaitskell's deputy in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and he was
a skilled operator in the field. He knew the potential value of a smooth system
of dissemihating sympathetic information, and he pressed for the Political
Warfare Executive's reinstatement to combat the Soviet propaganda machine.
The result was the creation of the Information Reseazch Department (IRD), a
small organization which existed uneasily under the Foreign Office's umbrella,
but with sepazate premises at Riverwalk House, Millbank Its task was to
acquire useful intelligence from the secret agencies, principally SIS, and ensure
that it was used to good effect against the Russians and their surrogates. In
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the jargon of the intelligence community, the IRD became known as 'an
instrument of news management', distributing material helpful to British policy
on an unattributable basis.
The IRD had no opportunity to play a part in the war of words conducted
in New York during the Palestine crisis, but it did prove highly effective in
Malaya where Alex Peterson and Hugh Carleton Greene had used radio and
pamphlets to undermine the Communist insurgents, and in Kenya where the
use of 'voice aircraft' had been pioneered to persuade the Mau-Mau rebels to
surrender. A similar exercise had been carried out in Cyprus under the direction
of Bernard Fergusson to counter the pro-EOKA broadcasts from Athens.
Inevitably there were, at IRD's margins, some grey areas that could be usefully
exploited by SIS, and that is exactly what happened. The first step was
the development of the Arab News Agency (Cairo) Limited, an SIS front
organisation and a conduit for IRD-inspired news and feature stories. Virtually
all the important Arabic newspapers subscribed to the ANA, which was
eventually to boast branch offices in almost every capital in the Middle East.
Among its clients was another IRD operation, the Sharq al-Adna 'voice of
Britain' radio station at Limassol in Cyprus. Among the directors of the ANA
were two career SIS officers, Alan Hare and Adelaide Maturin, another veteran
of SOE. But although both the ANA and its two subsidiaries, Near and Far
East News Limited and Near and Far East (Asia) Limited, prospered and proved
an extremely useful covert amt to British diplomacy by the suaeptitious
manipulation of public opinion, it was their dose relationship with the Friends
that brought them to the brink of disaster and contributed to SIS's greatest
post-war catastrophe: Suez.
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Operation STRAGGLE
'Altogether it was an amateur approach for a country which prided itself on
the high standards of its more recondite intelligence agencies:
Roy Fullick and Geoffrey Powell, Suez The Double Was'
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Although nominally an independent kingdom, Egypt had been firmly within
Britain's sphere of influence since the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty had been signed
by Eden back in 1936, and even before that. This had allowed Eor a substantial
British military presence in the country for at least twenty years and had
designated a Canal zone which was to be under Britain's exclusive military
control. This arrangement gave Britain an important strategic base from which
its interests in the region could be protected. It also ensured free passage along
the Suez Canal, the vital shortcut to the Far East for the West's shipping.
In the immediate post-war era growing Egyptian nationalism, combined
with discontent over widespread corruption and other grumbles, served to
undermine Britain s local standing. The Egyptian army's poor performance
against Israel in the 1948 war was also a strong factor, for perfidious Britain
had been blamed by the Arab League for handing Palestine over to the Jews
and for keeping the army poorly trained and equipped. Thus, in 1950, the
Wafd movement was voted into office on a wave of anti-British feeling. These
sentiments were expressed by the new Prime Minister, Nahas Pasha, when he
announced that the 1936 treaty would be terminated when it came up for
renewal in five years' time. He also began applying pressure on the Canal
zone so as to have the number of British troops stationed there reduced to
the figure agreed in the treaty. The Labour Government's attitude to these
developments was firm. Withdrawal was acceptable, but only when suitable
arrangements had been made to guarantee security in the region. However,
in October 1951, a decision was taken to end the 1936 treaty unilaterally and
to declare Farouk king of both Egypt and the Sudan.
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Egypt, of course, had long made claims over the Sudan, but that country
was the responsibility of a joint British and Egyptian condominium. As the
new Conservative Foreign Secretary, Eden insisted that Britain could only
agree to the extension of Farouk's kingdom if it had been ratified first by the
Sudanese. He also pointed out that intemationai treaties could not be legally
ended unilaterally. It was against this political background of rising tension
that the CIA intervened.
The US State Department saw no justification for supporting the almost
colonial position of the British in Egypt and feared that a British refusal to
negotiate might push the country towards the Russians. As the local situation
deteriorated, with Nahas Pasha encouraging terrorist attacks on British troops
garrisoned in the Canal zone, the Americans began to take an active interest
and gave support to the Egyptian claim over the Sudan. As a first step, the
CIA Station Chief in Cairo established contact with leaders of a growing
number of anti-monarchist Egyptian army officers known as the Society of
Free Officers.2 He reasoned that because they were equally opposed to the
Communists and the extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood, the officers might
offer a stable and reliable alternative to Farouk's corrupt governments.
By January 1952, the Canal zone was almost completely cut off from the
rest of the country. Murderous attacks on individual British soldiers prevented
them from visiting local towns, and all the local labour force had been
withdrawn. So had the supply of fresh food and water. One particular guerrilla
assault, at the Tel-el-Kebir munitions depot, prompted a fierce counter-attack
on Ismailia, where the fedayeen had been based. The town was quickly occupied,
but the police station refused to surrender. A gun battle Followed, in which
fifty Egyptians were killed and 100 wounded. Once news of the massacre
reached' Cairo, a mob took to the streets and went on ananti-European
rampage, burning dozens of shops, offices, hotels and cinemas. Eight Britons
died in the riot, which also claimed the loss of the exclusive Turf Club and
the famous Shepheazd's Hotel. The Egyptian army eventually marched in to
restore order, but only after the fire-raisers and looters had done their worst,
and the threat had been made to send in British troops.
During the following six months Egypt underwent a period of unpre-
cedented instability, with Farouk dismissing Nahas Pasha as Prime Minister
and appointing temporary replacements. None survived long and, on 1 July,
yet another nominee formed an administration which, like the others before
it, was marked only by the scale of corruption it appeazed to endorse. Egypt's
political structure was in turmoil, ripe for a coup. It happened on 22 July 1952,
when General Mohammed Neguib seized power in Cairo. Leading some 3,000
hoops and Z00 officers, he stormed the army headquarters in Abbasiya, the
Radio Cairo building and its relay transmitter at Abu Za'bal, leaving the
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announcement of the coup to one of his principal lieutenants, Colonel Anwar
Sadat. Three days later Neguib entered Alexandria, where Farouk was at his
summer residence, the Ras-el-Tin palace, and presented him with an ultimatum:
abdicate before noon and go into exile or Eace execution. Farouk promptly
embarked for Naples on the royal yacht al-Mahrusa that same evening,
accompanied by what was left of the country's gold reserves.
Neguib's bloodless coup had been engineered largely by the CIA in the
person of Kermit Roosevelt and, as the CIA's local Station Chief later
confirmed, 'official Washington was delighted'' Roosevelt's protege, and the
shadowy leader of the revolutionary Free Officers behind Neguib, was Colonel
Nasser, an inspired nationalist who was to be underestimated by almost every
European who met him. He was also the recipient of approximately $3 million
of CIA funds via a Swiss bank account. As another senior CIA officer was
later wryly to admit, 'We backed the wrong horse there.'4
From the British perspective the revolution was not entirely unwelcome.
Neguib was half Sudanese and was anxious to settle Egypt's territorial claims.
With Farouk gone, the question of his monarchy did not arise, and Neguib
accepted Britain's commitment to self-determination for the Sudan. In February
1953, Eden reached a compromise agreement with Neguib, which involved a
British withdrawal from the Sudan within three years and a guarantee that the
Sudanese could build their own constitution.
The truth about Nasser only began to dawn on the CIA late in February
1954, when Neguib was manoeuvred into resigning, leaving him in control.
The only challenge to Nasser came externally from Israel, which made a
bungled attempt to destabilize his position during the summer with a bombing
campaign. The Israelis calculated, wrongly as it turned out, that such lingering
CIA support that Nasser enjoyed would evaporate if American premises in
Egypt were targeted Eor attack. The scheme, masterminded and executed by
a Mossad network of pro-Zionist Egyptians already well established, involved
the placing of incendiary devices in various public buildings, including the US
libraries in Cairo and Alexandria. All went well until 23 July, when a Mossad
agent, Philip Nathanson, burst into Flames in a Cairo cinema. His small
incendiary bomb, disguised as a spectacles case, had gone off prematurely.
Nathanson was only slightly hurt, but he was in a worse condition by the
time the Mukhabarat, Nasser s Feared security apparatus, had completed his
interrogation. Virtually the entire ring was caught, exposing awell-developed,
deep-cover Mossad operation. Two of its key members, Max Bennet and an
Egyptian Jew named Karmonah, later committed suicide, but six others were
eventually tried and sentenced to terms of imprisonment. Two of those
convicted, Shmuel Azar and Dr Moshe Marzouk, were hanged.
The affair caused a political storm behind the scenes in Tel Aviv, because
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the operation had only received prior approval from Benjamin Gibly, Israel's
chief of military intelligence. But in Cairo, the incident enhanced Nasser's
reputation and made him even more popular. However, the entire episode
helped tum the Colonel into a ruthless tyrant, as he was to demonstrate a few
months later when, on 26 October, a plumber named Mahmoud Abd el-Calif
took a shot at him during a political rally in Alexandria. Nasser responded to
the amateurish assassination attempt by the lone religious fanatic as though
it was evidence of another huge plot. He ordered a nationwide purge, in which
700 civilians were arrested on charges of high treason and Z50 army officers
were hauled before military tribunals charged with plotting against him. By
the following year, more than 3,000 political prisoners had been detained.
Even though Nasser cracked down hard on dissident elements within Egypt,
he still maintained cordial relations with Britain and took every opportunity
to repeat that he wished to be on the best of terms with Eden. It was just that
he did not want any British soldiers on Egyptian soil. Accordingly, a new
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was negotiated by Eden's Under-Secretary at the
Foreign Office, Anthony Nutting, who agreed that all British troops would be
withdrawn over a period of twenty months. The small print of the Final text
actually allowed civilian personnel to remain in the Canal zone for a further
seven years.
Nassei s ambitions and his nationalism were not limited to Egypt. He had
an Arab vision and used Radio Cairo, now renamed 'Voice of the Arabs', to
export his anti-Imperialist message. With the wireless becoming an important
medium for propaganda, Nasser had an impact throughout the Middle East;
even Britain's most trusted allies, like Iraq and Jordan, were forced by Egyptian-
. inspired civil disorder to reconsider their links with the West. The main victim
of Nassef s fiery anti-colonialism was the Baghdad Pact, Eden's idea for a
NATO-style organization in the Middle East. In February 1954, the Turkish
Prime Minister signed a mutual co-operation agreement with Iraq's pro-British
leader, Nuri es-Said. This was followed by a defence pact with Pakistan, Britain
and Z.ahedfs Iran. It was only when Jordan opened talks about joining too
that Nasser flexed his propaganda muscles and directed his attention to Arab
nationalist feelings in Amman. Riots broke out and the talks were quickly
terminated.
Nasser s extraordinary success during this period took many by surprise,
but at least he was determined to capitalize on his achievements and fulfil his
most potent ambition: to confront Israel and restore Egypt's lost battle honours.
To this end he embarked upon a modernization programme for the am1y.
Since the West was reluctant to supply weapons in breach of an international
embargo designed to avoid upsetting the balance of power in the region,
Nasser fumed to the Soviet Bloc and, in September 1955, made a huge, secret,
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arms deal with the Czechs. The scale of the purchase was so enormous -
involving 300 tanks, 200 MiG-IS fighters, 50 Ilyushin bombers, 100 armoured
self-propelled guns, 4 minesweepers and 2 destroyers -that it could not be
kept under wraps for long. Almost as soon as the first batch of Fifty medium
tanks was delivered, reports of the sale started to circulate. According to the
Israelis, who viewed this development with considerable alarm, the new
equipment would take a year to be brought into active service, but at the end
of that period Egypt would represent a formidable threat to regional stability.
From SIS's viewpoint these developments spelt serious trouble, because its
role in Egypt had always been limited to gathering intelligence about Soviet
Bloc personalities so that the Foreign Office could anticipate Moscow's diplo-
matic moves. The arms deal, negotiated at a senior level by the Soviet Foreign
Minister, Dmitri Shepilov, was worth well over $400 million, ample proof that
the Russians intended to increase their influence in the area. The Soviet
Embassy in Cairo was also expanding at a prodigious rate. Under nom~al
arcumstances these matters would have been the responsibility of SIME, Bill
Oughton's regional MI5 office at RAF Fayid, but the withdrawal to Cyprus
had left it with only a skeleton staff -which, in reality, consisted of just
the local DSO, Gerald Savage, who was based at Moascar, outside Ismailia.
But even if it had been within SIME's brief to interfere in Egyptian dom-
estic politics, the organization would have been hard-pressed to find reliable
sources within the ranks of Nasser s Free Officers. Several of their number,
including Anwar Sadat, had been interned by SIME during the war for their
pro-Axis sympathies. Thus, the burden fell on the Friends, who were less than
prepared. ,
Throughout thepost-war period, Colonel John Teague had exercised control
over SIS's assets in the Middle East. Educated at Portsmouth Grammar School,
he had originally intended to become an organist. The First World War
intervened and he was commissioned into the Warwickshire Regiment, with
whom he won the Military Cross in France; he later transfeaed to the Indian
army and was attached to the Sykes Mission to south Persia. In I9I9, he was
appointed Vice-Consul in Shiraz and took an active part in the Iraq revolt the
following year. Throughout the rest of the I920s, he served in Iraq, Kurdistan
and the North-West Frontier and qualified as a Persian interpreter. The Arab
revolt in 1936 found him in Palestine as an intelligence officer, and in 1942
he finally joined SIS as DSO, Iraq. He had an unrivalled knowledge of Arab
affairs and occasionally contributed articles to newspapers. He had taken
charge of ISLD after Teddy Smith-Ross's departure in 1945 and had later been
appointed Controller Middle East, before being replaced by George Young in
1953.
Teague's local station in Cairo was in the hands of Rodney Dennys, a
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veteran of Section V and ISLD who had been sent to Turkey in 1950 to
replace Philby. He had joined SIS shortly before the outbreak of war and had
been caught up in the appalling Venlo incident in Holland in November 1940.
Thereafter, he had married Graham Greene's sister and run double agents
against the Nazis with considerable success. Upon his transfer to Ankara,
Dennys's post was taken by Geoffrey Hinton, a graduate of Worcester College,
Oxford, who had transferred to SIS from the Ministry of Information at the
end of the war.
Although the Cairo Station was powerless to sabotage Nasser's improving
relationship with the Soviets, Broadway could monitor the progress of the
arms deal with considerable accuracy. Quite apart from GCHQ's technical
coverage of the diplomatic traffic passing between Czechoslovakia and Cairo,
SIS had recruited a useful agent in the Egyptian Embassy in Prague named
Mohammed Hamdi. From his position in the Embassy's commercial section,
he supplied detailed reports on each of the shipments. In addition, the ANA
in Cairo had built up a large network based on 'freelance correspondents',
several of whom happened to be in the Egyptian army and navy. Thanks to
the ANA and GCHQ, the Friends were able to keep the Foreign Office well
informed about the status of the Egyptian military. However, this position
was to change dramatically in 1956, at a most critical moment, just as Nasser
announced his intention of nationalizing the Suez Canal.
The Canal concession had been granted originally by the Khedive Ismail in
1866 and was not due to expire until 1969, but Nasser was determined to
renegotiate it. In particular, he wanted repatriation of the Canal company's
overseas investments, a greater share of the waterway's revenues for Egypt
and a controlling interest on the board. Britain's attitude, as articulated by
Eden who had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in April 1955, was
identical to the view previously expressed to Mussadeq: international agree-
ments could not be subject to unilateral change. On 26 July 1956, Nasser
simply carried out his threat and took over the Canal. Since the last British
troops had left the Canal zone in the middle of June, by the agreed deadline,
Britain was powerless to do anything to prevent him.
Britain was not alone in experiencing difficulties with Nasser. Israel was
becoming increasingly agitated by the build-up of military hardware in Egypt,
and France's overseas intelligence agency, SDECE, blamed Nasser for giving
arms to the Arab rebels in Algeria. In addition, Nasser s hand could be detected
in other none-too-encouraging developments in the Middle East. In January
1956, an assassination plot against Iraq's Prime Minister was uncovered,
implicating the Egyptian Military Attache; and on I March General Sir John
Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion in Jordan, was suddenly
dismissed by the King, supposedly under pressure from Nasser. Even if that
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Operation STRAGGLE 103
assumption was unfounded, it had been Nasser who had actually broken the
news of Glubb's sacking to the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, while on a
visit to Cairo. Nasser's advance knowledge was clearly indicative of his
complicity in the affair, which was certainly in line with his well-known anti-
colonialist sentiments.
However, the lynchpin for Operation STRAGGLE, if one was needed, was
the Mukhabarat's sudden descent on the ANA on 27 August. The office
manager, James Swinburn, a former teacher who had spent twenty-five years
in Egypt, was arrested, along with Five others, including Charles Pittuck, a
local employee of Marconi s who happened to be in Swinburn's flat in Zamalek
at the time of the raid, and James Zarb, the Maltese-born owner of a local
ceramics factory. Swinbum was the head of SIS's stay-behind network, and
Pittuck was to have been his stand-in while he went abroad. Fortunately,
Pittuck had only just been introduced to the organization and was later able
to plead innocence. The others implicated were not so lucky.
A thorough search of Swinbum's home revealed dozens of compromising
documents relating to the Czech arms deal. There were reports from agents
on the location of Egyptian army units, the arrival of new Soviet-built tank
transporters, details of a new radar station outside Cairo, the delivery of anti-
tank equipment to the paramilitary national guard and even an assessment of
the competence of the naval defences around Alexandria. Some of the naval
papers, which disclosed the movements of a tank landing-ship, the Akka,
identified the name of Swinbum's principal informant, Sayed Amin Mahmoud,
the headmaster of a preparatory school. He had given an account of recent
naval manoeuvres in which his son, Captain Ahmed Amin Mahmoud, had
taken part, and had speculated that the Akka was about to be used as a
blockship in the Canal. Another ship, the Sudan, was said to have been filled
with explosives in order to block the entrance to Alexandria's harbour. Captain
Mahmoud had been a particulazly well-placed source, as he had previously
been General Neguib's naval aide. Another, equally well-infomled agent,
Youssef Megali Hanna, described how a team of twelve East German rocket
scientists had recently been recruited to aid an Egyptian missile programme,
and how the Syrians had requested the construction of an aviation college and
aircraft repair complex outside Damascus.
One batch of compromising documents revealed the monthly production
figures for Egypt's tiny armaments industry and disclosed their origin, an army
mechanic named Salah Hassan Bedeir. An Egyptian detective, Massif Morkos
Mikhail, had apparently written lengthy reports on Communist activities for
the ANA, as had several others working under journalistic cover, including
Mohammed Ebeid, an architect; Youssef Bedeir, who was one of Zarb's local
employees; Anton Yakoub Abdelmalik, a genuine journalist; Samnel Attiya,
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formerly a Sudanese civil servant; and Ahmed el-Bayed Rewish, a parliamentary
clerk.
The day after the raid two diplomats at the British Embassy, J. G. Gove, the
head of the Visa Section, and John Flux the Commercial First Secretary who
had worked in Cairo since 1919, were expelled for espionage. Consular access
to the prisoners was refused, and over the next few days more than thirty of
Swinburn's contacts, both professional and social, were rounded up. Four
Britons managed to escape arrest (only to be tried in absentia the following
year), but SIS's greatest loss was that of Colonel Milovan Gregorivitch, a
well-connected, long-serving agent who had been recruited during the war by
ISLD and had operated against Eastern Bloc embassies ever since. (He was
the nephew of Slobodan Yovanovitch, the wartime Yugoslavian Prime Minister
in exile.) Also taken into custody at the same time was one of his sub-agents,
Hussein Ali el-ICashef, a guard at the Yugoslav Embassy.
Lengthy confessions were extracted from Zarb and Swinbum, and both
were eventually sentenced to temis of imprisonment. However, before they
could be put on trial, Operation STRAGGLE was executed.
The military component of STRAGGLE was codenamed HAMILCAR,
and the details of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt are well documented.
What is not quite so well known is the contribution made by the British
intelligence community. At that time, in the summer of 1956, Broadway was
recovering from the triple blows of the loss of the Berlin tunnel, the Crabb
fiasco and the exposure of the ANA front. Each, in their own way, had been
utterly disastrous. The first incident had been written off as an expensive but
occupational setback; the next had caused a profound loss of confidence in
SIS and had led to the replacement of Sir John Sinclair as CSS by Sir Dick
White.
News of White's appointment received a mixed reception at Broadway. It
is not so much that Sinclair had been especially popular, but members of SIS
were anxious about its future, which had been dropped into the hands of a
relative stranger. Worse still, he was a career product of MI5, SIS's long-time
rival in Whitehall. Some old-timers talked of 'gamekeepers fumed poachers',
but White was an exceptional officer in every way. Indeed his first assignment
for MIS had been a spell abroad as an undercover agent.
Unlike his contemporaries, White had not been educated at a well-known
public school. He had, nevertheless, read history at Oxford, where he had won
an exhibition to Christ Church, and had spent two years in America at the uni-
versities of Michigan and Berkeley, California. When he was approached to join
the Security Service in 1936, he had been an assistant teacher at a school in
Croydon. He had jumped at the offer and had spent the following nine months
based in Munich, travelling around the country making useful contacts. Upon
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Operation STRAGGLE 105
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his return he had been indoctrinated into one of MI5's best cases: Wolfgang
zu Putlitz, then a diplomat at the German Embassy in London. Zu Putlitz was
a confirmed homosexual and Marxist, and was easily one MI5's best sources
of intelligence. His information was so valuable that he had been run by a
small group of senior British officials which had included Sir Robert Vansittart,
the Chief Diplomatic Adviser at the Foreign Office, and David Footman from
SIS. MI5's two representatives on this informal committee had been 'Klop'
Ustinov, the legendary agent-runner and one-time Press Attache at the German
Embassy, and the youthful White. Zu Putlitz had continued to supply MI5
and SIS until November 1940, when he had been operating from the Gemlan
Legation in The Hague. Eventually, he had been forced to escape to London
when a leak threatened to compromise him, thus ending a highly productive
period as one of Britain's key German sources.
When war broke out, MI5's B Division had undergone a sudden expansion
to cope with the new demands on its counter-espionage branch; White had
been selected to become Assistant Director under his mentor, Guy Liddell. In
that post he had supervised many of the most successful wartime operations
and had acquired a detailed knowledge of MI5's greatest wartime successes,
on which its post-war reputation rested: the 'double-cross' agents used to
deceive the enemy and the cryptographic breakthroughs which had betrayed
so many of the Abwehr s plans. He had, in short, enjoyed a 'good war and
had ended it as MI5's nominee heading SHAEF's intelligence organization on
the Continent after the D-Day landings. He had also conducted the Allied
investigation into Hitler's fate. When SHAEF eventually had been wound up,
White had been lent to the Control Commission's Intelligence Division and
had then undertaken a tour of duty with SIME.
On his return to London White had been appointed Director of MI5's B
Division, and it was at that point, in 1949, that his career had threatened to
nosedive. A German physicist, Klaus Fuchs, had been identified by GCHQ as a
Soviet spy. Fuchs had then been working on top-secret projects at the Atomic
Energy Research Establishment at Hazwell and had recently been sleazed for
access to classified material When MI5's enquiry into Fuchs s background was
initiated, it was realized that another B Division officer, Michael Serpell,
had already reviewed his personal file and had suggested an immediate
investigation. For reasons that never became clear, the recommendation had
been filed routinely without any action being taken. When the Director-
General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, had been informed of the slip-up, he had disciplined
White publicly in the presence of all his staff, a humiliation that nearly had
prompted White's resignation He had only been persuaded to remain in the
Service by his friends Guy Liddell and Roger Hollis, who both had persuaded
Sillitoe to conceal MI5's gaffe from the Prime Minister. They insisted that the
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public disclosure of the blunder would undermine confidence in the Security
Service and destroy morale. Reluctantly, the Director-General had given
Attlee a sanitized version of events, which omitted to mention how Serpell's
endorsement of the Fuchs file had been overlooked.
White recovered from this experience, and the errors that enabled Burgess
and Maclean to escape abroad undetected, because the essential secrecy of the
organization had prevented outsiders from ever Teaming the truth. However,
when Sillitoe retired in 1953, Liddell's well-known friendship with Burgess had
precluded him from the succession which, in the opinion of many, was rightly
his. Instead, he had gone to the Atomic Energy Authority as its Chief Security
Officer and White had moved up to become the new D-G at the age of just
forty-seven. His tenure during the following three years is marked by his
complete reorganization of the office's six divisions and the establishment, for
the Eirst time, of a personnel branch. Many saw White's changes as a sure sign
that the traditional amateur status of MI5's officers had gone for ever and had
been replaced by a more professional structure which offered a proper career
to new entrants. His promotion also marked the end of the flawed elitism
which had given Burgess, Maclean and Philby their opportunities to penetrate
Whitehall.
Eden's decision to switch White from the Security Service to the Friends,
as recommended by Sir Norman Brook, was quite extraordinary, but also quite
brilliant. He was an experienced operator, acknowledged in the corridors of
power as one of the architects of MIS's acclaimed wartime strategy and widely
known as having participated in the running of zu Putlitz, an operation then
still regarded as something of a coup. It only became known much later that
zu Putlitz had returned to East Germany in 1952 and had been heavily involved
with Burgess, Blunt and maybe .even the NKVD.
White s task upon his arrival at Broadway was to prevent the Friends from
embarrassing the Prime Minister again and to restructure the organization so
as to minimize the damage caused by Philby. White, of course, had been
intimately involved in the Philby case since his dismissal from SIS in 1951,
and had known him as a colleague when they had routinely met to discuss
counter-intelligence matters during the war years. He had even interrogated
Philby twice immediately upon his recall to London. Although he was later
to be called 'ineffective' by Philby,s White had been convinced of Philby's
dupliaty and his subsequent report ensured that Menzies had sacked him.
White had also reviewed the case again in 1955 and had arranged for Philby
to undergo yet another inquisition, because the Government had commissioned
a speaal report on the Burgess and Maclean defections. Thus, when a few
months later White moved into Sinclair s flat 'over the shop' at 21 Queen
Anne's Gate, at the rear of Broadway Buildings, he was fully aware of
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Operation STRAGGLE 107
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SIS's closely guarded secret: that in contradiction to the Foreign Secretary's
supposedly categoric statement the previous year in the House of Commons,
there was every reason to believe that 'Mr H. A. R. Philby ... had betrayed
the interests of this country or [toj identify him with the so-called "third-man",
if indeed there was one.'6
The irony of White's appointment must be in MI5's belated attempt to
help cover up the Crabb fiasco for SIS, and the fact that its hands had never
been quite as clean in the affair as the Prime Minister had been led to believe.
White, the newcomer, found that he had to operate without afull-time
Foreign Office Adviser as the Crabb affair had cost Michael Williams his job,
although officially he was not to go until the end of October 1956; he
began finding his feet by reading up all the current cases. Easton, of course,
was preoccupied with his anti-Soviet activities, which meant that, because of
a set of extraordinarily unusual circumstances, SIS was virtually rudderless
and in the hands of a single shadowy, but influential, Whitehall figure, the
Chairman of the JIC, Sir Patrick Dean.
Dean had been educated at Rugby and read Classics at Cambridge before
switching to law. He had practised as a barrister before joining the Foreign
Office in 1939 as a legal adviser. At the end of the war he had moved to the
German Political Department, which he headed until 1950 when he served
briefly in Rome, his only overseas post. He then returned to take up his
appointment as a civilian instructor at the Imperial Defence College and moved
to chair the JIC in 1953. As his deputy, Geoffrey McDermott, explained:
Dean ... was responsible for all relations with the fighting and intelligence
services. He was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee which
contained representatives, at major-general level, of the three services,
MI5, MI6, the Joint Intelligence Bureau, and the Commonwealth Relations
and Colonial Offices. The CIA representative attended some meetings. It
reported to the Chiefs of Staff and to ministers, through the Permanent
Under-Secretary, the late Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick.'
Dean was to play a key role in Operation STRAGGLE, but it should be
remembered that he was merely the instrument of Eden's determination to
'knock Nasser off his perch :? The Prime Minister was in poor health, still not
fully recovered from a complicated, second operation he had endured in Boston
to restore his severed bile duct. Eden saw Nasser as a threat to world peace,
with 'his thumb on our windpipe' q and was determined to be rid of him once
and Eor all. He made no bones about how he wanted the job done. Anthony
Nutting later recalled how, after the House of Commons debate on General
Glubb's dismissal, Eden had angrily abandoned the usual Foreign Office
euphemisms and demanded immediate action: 'What's all this nonsense about
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~ 08 The Friends
isolating Nasser or "neutralizing" him as you call it? I want him destroyed,
can't you understand?'10 From that moment onwards, SIS commenced work
on a series of options to remove Nasser permanently from the scene. Inside
SIS, responsibility for producing a plan of campaign fell to the CME, George
Young, Cyril Rolo and Nigel Clive.
Young was a big, florid Scotsman from Dumfriesshire with strong right-
wing political convictions encouraged by his Dutch East Indies wife Geryke,
whom he had met while at university. In fact, he had studied languages at
Giessen, Dijon, St Andrews and Yale. Before the war he had worked as a
journalist on the Glasgow Herald and had joined SIS in 1943. At the end of
hostilities, he had been appointed Head of Station in Vienna before returning
two years later to take charge of R6, SIS's economic section. In I95I, he
handed over R6 to Maurice Firth and became Middle East Controller where
he took a firm grasp of the crisis in Iran. His solution for Suez was to be
equally robust, helped in large measure by Rolo, a veteran of the campaign in
the Western Desert whose first assignment for SIS had been in Austria
immediately after the war. He had then been posted to Rome before taking
over the Berlin Station in 1950. Two years later he was back at Broadway, on
the Middle East desk, alongside Give, a former SOE officer who had fought
with the partisans in Greece before joining the Friends in 1945. After two
years in Greece with Monty Woodhouse, he had made the brave but doomed
attempt to establish an SIS office in Jerusalem. Afterwards he had been recalled
to Broadway and then posted in 1950 to the Baghdad Station, where he stayed
for the following three years. While Young ran the Cyprus end of CME, Clive
and Rolo handled the London desk
Geoffrey McDermott recalled the remarkable conditions of secrecy in which
Operation HAMILCAR was planned:
Our instructions, passed down by word of mouth from Eden, were both
clear and unusual. First, only we three [Dean, Kirkpatrick and McDermott]
were to be in on all the intelligence and planning. The three were to be
reduced to two at a later stage. Other under-secretaries, for instance the
experts on economic matter, Middle Eastern problems, or Anglo-American
relations, were to be kept in the dark as Ear as possible. The task was to be
given top priority as well as top secrecy. And the object of our plan was
to topple Nasser, by force of course as this could not be done otherwise."
While Eden was urging SIS to come up with firm proposals, the Israelis had
persuaded the French to break the Tripartite Declaration of May 1950, which
in effect had placed a ban on anus sales to the belligerents in the region. On
Z2 June 1956, Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Chief of Staff, and Shimon Peres,
Director-General of the Defence Ministry, flew to Paris for a clandestine
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meeting with senior members of the French administration, including the
deputy Chief of Staff of the French air force, General Maurice Challe. The
negotiations lasted three days, at the end of which Dayan's party had spent
$80 million and obtained a promise of seventy-two Mystere 4 fighters, 200
AMX tanks and enough ammunition to arm the lot. The first shipment was
delivered a month later to Haifa, where it was unloaded at night, with the
entire dock area cordoned off, but word of it quickly reached the SIS Station
in Tel Aviv and was passed on to London.
The first political moves that enabled STRAGGLE, SIS's plot to topple
Nasser, to take place happened on Sunday I4 October, when the French acting
Prime Minister, Albert Gazier, and General Challe Flew into RAF Northolt
and were driven straight to Chequers Eor an afternoon meeting with Eden and
Nutting. Gazier was there because Prime Minister Christian Pineau was in
New York attending the UN Security Council meeting which was trying to
thrash out a compromise agreement for the continued Canal concession with
Selwyn Lloyd and Dr Fawzi, Nasser's Foreign Minister.
No account of what took place at Chequers that afternoon has ever been
published, but Nutting has been quoted as being 'appalled'12 by what he
witnessed. Since General Challe had participated in the Israeli amts deal and
the Chequers meeting, and Eden had Teamed at least part of its terms, it is
very likely that the Prime Minister suggested a combined move against Nasser,
involving the Israelis too. In any event, Eden summoned Lloyd back to London
on Monday IS March and the next day, Tuesday, both men flew to Paris for
talks with Pineau and his Foreign Minister, Guy Mollet. Once again, no record
was made of the meeting, but from subsequent events it is clear that a scheme
had been agreed, at least in outline, for recovering control of the Canal. The
details, and the involvement of the Israelis in the plan, were left to a further
secret conference held on 22 October at private house near Sevres, to the
south-west of Paris, and organized by Pierre Boursicot, SDECE's Chie? On
that afternoon, Lloyd and his private secretary, (Sir) Donald Logan, drove to
RAF Hendon and returned to France with Patrick Dean to meet Peres, David
Ben-Gurion and Dayan. The British party arrived at the French military airfield
at ViAacoublay around 7 p.m. and, during the course of the following five
hours, negotiated with Pineau and Mollet over. exactly how they would
complete their 'uncomfortable task'.13
On the following day, Lloyd went to Downing Street to report the outcome
of his visit and then despatched Logan to the Quai d'Orsay for further
consultations with Gazier. However, no sooner had Logan arrived than Pineau
deaded to see Eden and Lloyd in London. Accordingly, a French plane flew
the pair back to Hendon, and Pineau had a short meeting at Downing Street
before dining with Lloyd at his official residence at 2 Carlton Gardens. Once
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again, no record was made of khe exchanges, but it may well be that Pineau
was urging action. With 250,000 French troops engaged incounter-insurgency
operations in Tunisia and Algeria, he had good reason to be anxious. He may
also have disclosed that SDECE had intercepted an Egyptian ship, the Athos,
that very day, loaded with weapons and bound for the FLN rebels in Algeria.
Once a Royal Navy minesweeper, the Athos had been chartered in Milan to
carry a consignment of arms to Pakistan, but, thanks to a tip from the Italian
Secret Service, SIFAR (the Servizio Informazioni Forzi Anntate Republicane),
SDECE had intervened soon after the ship had called at Alexandria. The cargo
of seventy tons of weapons, enough to equip 3,000 men, had been captured,
providing incontrovertible proof of Nasser s support for the FLN.
Early on the morning of Wednesday 24 October, Eden briefed Dean on his
meeting with Pineau and explained that a joint plan of action had been arrived
at. Britain and France would invade Egypt if there was a major threat to the
Canal. Dean was instructed to go to Paris and complete the deal. This he did,
briefing Logan on the aircraft. The result was an astonishing, typewritten
document which set out the role of each of the main participants in HAMIL-
CAR, step by step: Israel was to launch an attack on Egypt and press ahead
to reach the Suez Canal within twenty-four hours; Britain and France would
issue an ultimatum requiring Egypt to accept temporary occupation of the
Canal's key points; and afull-scale Anglo-French invasion would be launched
'within twelve hours' if no reply had been received. In an addendum to the
main schedule, it was confirmed that Israel could take possession of the west
shore of the Gulf of Aqaba and the strategically important islands in the Tiran
Straits. In return, Israel promised not to attack Jordan, and Britain undertook
to dissuade Jordan from joining the conflict. The final paragraph imposed
secrecy on the agreement for ever. With Logan's consent Dean put his
signature to the agreement, and champagne was passed around.
This document, typewritten in French and bearing three signatures, has
never been seen because it disappeazed soon after Dean delivered it to Eden.
Instead of being congratulated for having finalized HAMILCAR, Dean was
reprimanded for having put the details down on paper. Eden snatched Dean's
copy from him and then insisted that the remaining carbon copies of what he
termed 'the protocol' be burned immediately. Thus, the very next morning
Dean and Logan made their way back to the Quai d'Orsay and asked Pineau
to suaender his copy. Pineau dissembled, and then locked Dean and Logan in
a reception-room for most of the rest of the day while he consulted with his
advisers. When eventually they were escorted back to Pineau's office, there
was bad news. The French Goven~unent had Beaded to keep its copy, and the
third carbon was akeady on its way to Tel Aviv. Nor, indeed, was the French
Goven~unent prepared to put pressure on the Israelis to destroy their version.
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Operation STRAGGLE
Suddenly, Eden had been entrapped by his own scheme. Even if he wanted to
pull out, he would be unable to do so. Both the Israelies and the French had
absolute proof of his 'collusion'.
In fact, Eden was not to be deterred by the unspoken threat of exposure
and lost none of his enthusiasm for the huge military undertaking, which had
now acquired the operational codename of MUSKETEER and had been
modified to take in the Canal. On 29 October, the Israelis attacked and swiftly
took 6,000 Egyptian and Palestinian prisoner of war in the Gaza Strip for the
loss of just four Israeli pilots. Almost the entire Egyptian air force was caught
on the ground, with only thirty Ilyushins managing to escape to Luxor. Even
those were pursued and, eventually, just a dozen survivors took refuge in
Saudi Arabia. After the prescribed two days of Fighting, the British and French
Governments issued their pre-agreed ultimatum, but the Israelis were still more
than seventy-five miles from the Canal. This meant that the Anglo-French
demand required the beleaguered Egyptian forces to withdraw more than 125
miles! Not surprisingly, Nasser declined to co-operate. Therefore, at dusk on
31 November, Canberra and Valiant bombers attacked nine Egyptian airfields.
Two days later, they returned to silence Radio Cairo's transmitters and, on 6
November, a combined force of 100,000 men, supported by 130 warships
(including six aircraft carriers), 100 freighters and 20,000 vehicles, began
disembarking around Alexandria.
Having played a major role in the planning of MUSKETEER through
STRAGGLE, SIS's activities in the field were somewhat limited. A special
Counter-Intelligence Unit, along the lines of those deployed on the Continent
after the D-Day landings, was formed in Akrotiri, and Gerald Savage, SIME's
fomler DSO in the Canal zone, was appointed to lead it. Its purpose was to
prevent any Egyptian stay-behind network from reporting on Allied troop
movements or sabotaging the invasion forces. It was also assigned the task of
keeping an eye on the Soviet Consul in Port Said Anatoli Tchikov, and taking
possession of the Egyptian Governor of Port Said's office safe. An experienced
safe-cracker had been recruited by SIS to blow it open, in the hope that it
would contain valuable intelligence, but it proved to be empty.
The military were later to complain bitterly about the quality of intelligence
available to them in the two staging points of Malta and Cyprus, but this was
not due to any shortcomings on SIS's part.'Indeed, the Friends had actually
persuaded the CIA to show them aerial reconnaissance photographs of Egyp-
tian airfields and other strategic targets, which had been taken by high-altitude
U-Z spy planes on routine overflights. Although several CIA officers suspected
what lay behind the requests, no advance warning of MUSKETEER leaked
to the US State Department or the White House. The U-Z information was
to be of critical importance, especially after 1 November when one of the
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RAF's photo-reconnaissance Canberras was attacked and crippled by Mies at
45,000 feet over Syria.
One of the more well-known complaints about the inadequacy of the
preparations for the Suez operation concerned the maps provided to the front-
line troops by the intelligence staff. They contained a town called Talata,
opposite the city of Ismailia, which, in fact, was non-existent. This crucial
mistake had arisen because the signal stations along the banks of the Canal
had been designated 1-2-3, which translated as Wahad, Etnein and Talata.
Thus the third station, a single building, somehow achieved the status of a
town on the maps. And, in spite of the U-2s' clandestine overflights, no one
had noticed that the key Gamil Bridge outside Port Said, the only road link
to the delta apart from the Canal's twin roads and railway, had been completed.
As one eyewitness observed, 'It was startling that plans based on such a
failure of intelligence could have been made by officers of an army that had
so recently quit the Canal zone.'14 There were also complaints about the grossly
inflated assessments of Egyptian strength on the ground. This copybook plan
was based on an intelligence picture which exaggerated Egyptian strength in
about the same degree as it misread the terrain,' recalled a participant. In
reality, it was a classic case of placing too much reliance on the value and
accuracy of the U-2 photographs. Although the pictures taken were of excellent
quality, and correctly identified the exact number of new Soviet-made planes
dispersed on various n~nways, there was insufficient analysis to determine
their readiness. It later turned out that there were not enough trained Egyptian
crews to fly them.
MUSKETEER began well enough and the Anglo-French invasion force
quelled what resistance it met in Port Said, causing heavy civilian casualties
(with the loss of only twenty-six Allied troops). As the invasion force moved
south towards Ismailia, more than 1,000 Egyptians were killed and complete
success looked imminent. Then, suddenly, the picture changed and, after rather
less than a day on Egyptian territory and within sight of its objectives, the
army was ordered to stop its advance and give way to a UN peace-keeping
force.
The conventional explanation for the swift cancellation of MUSKETEER
was the sudden drain on Britain's gold reserves caused by the closure of the
Canal by forty-seven Egyptian blockships. This meant buying oil from an
alternative source, chiefly America and Venezuela, with catastrophic conse-
quences for the economy. A dollar loan was required as an interim measure,
which was refused by the United States unless there was an immediate ceasefire.
The sterling collapse precipitated by the Chancellor s heavy purchase on the
world financial markets in support of the pound is generally supposed to have
forced Eden to abandon his Suez adventure. In reality, the decision to withdraw
?
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The Olympic Stadium Building in West Berlin where the local SIS station operated under cover of the
? Political Division of the British Control Commission for Germany.
All that remains today of the American radar station in Rudow, West Berlin, where SIS sank the shaft of
Operation PRINCE'stunnel.
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(Above /eR) Colonel Grigori Tokaev, SIS's first important Soviet defector who surrendered to the Head of
Station in Berlin late in October 1948. (Above right) Colonel Harold Perkins, the ruthless sabotage expert
recruited into S1S from the wartime Special Operations Executive who planted limpet mines on illegal
Jewish refugee ships destined for Palestine.
~X~
The bodies of Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, the two Security Intelligence Middle East NCOs
murdered by the Irgun during the ruthless undercover conflict in Palestine. Moments after this picture
was taken abooby-trapped landmine exploded close by.
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(Above) Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief
of the Secret Intelligence Service
from 1939 until his retirement in
1952, following his dismissal of Kim
Philby.
Kim Philby pictured in 1955 after he
had been publiGy cleared by the
Government of any involvement
with the defections of Burgess and
Maclean. He was later taken back
on to SIS's books as a part-time
informant and posted to Beirut
under journalistic cover.
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(Above left) Monty Woodhouse, SIS's Head of
Station in Tehran until 1955 and one of the
principal architects of Operation BOOT the
successful coup mounted against Dr Mussadeq,
the Iranian Prime Minister.
(Above right) Sir John Sinclair, the SIS Chief who
took early retirement following the death of Buster
Crabb, even though he had been on leave when
the operation had been originally approved.
Buster Crabb, an accomplished diver whose
participation in an authorized SIS operation led to
his mysterious death under a Soviet cruiser in
Portsmouth Harbour in April 1956.
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The er>trance to 516 Pushkin Street, Moscow, where Oleg Penkovsky used a radiator in the hallway as a
dead-letter drop to keep his CIA and SIS contacts supplied with secrets.
The lamp-post on Kutuzovsky Prospekt used by
Penkovsky to signal his Western case officers
who I'nied nearby. A black mark on the plate
indicated that~he wished to make contact.
The entrance to the Peking Restaurant inside the
Peking Hotel, Moscow It was here that Penkovsky
kept a rendezvous with Greville Wynne and first
spotted a KGB surveillance team.
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(Above) Greville Wynne (left) and Oleg
Penkovsky at their trial in Moscow.
Wynne was swapped for Konon Molody
after serving less than a year of his
sentence, but Penkovsky was shot.
Greville Wynne, one of several British
businessmen recruited by SIS to help
maintain corrtact with agents behind the
Iron Curtain. The photo shows him on
arrival at Northolt airstrip after being
swopped for Konon Molody, April 1964.
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(Above left) George Blake, formerly SIS's Head of Station in Seoul. Aster his release by the North
Koreans in 1953 he made contact with the KGB and offered his services to them two years later, when
he was posted to Berlin. (Above right) Maurice Oldfield, the counter-intelligence expert and former SIS
? Chief who was brought out of retirement in 1979 to co-ordinate security in Northern Ireland.
The old KGB headquaaers in Moscow, with its new rarely photographed annexe on the left.
?
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(Left) Oleg Gordievsky (left),
once the KGB's Rezident in
London, who was successfully
exfiltrated from Moscow in
August 1985 after twelve years o'
spying for SIS.
(Below) The British Embassy in
Moscow with one of SIS's two
converted Commer vans visible
under the portico. It was used in
July 1985 to smuggle Oleg
Gordievsky across the frontier to
Fnland.
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Operation STRAGGLE 113
from Suez was prompted by a Soviet threat to intervene -with nuclear
weapons if necessary. The warning from Moscow might have been ignored,
except that GCHQ analysts reported a massive mobilization, apparently
in conjunction with a Russian invasion of Hungary. According to further
information given by GCHQ to the JIC, the Soviet Foreign Minister had
promised the Egyptian Ambassador that Khrushchev would authorize a massive
operation to repel the Anglo-French invaders. Afull-scale war seemed immi-
nent, and Dean was obliged to advise Eden that MUSKETEER should be
terminated with immediate effect.
The entire episode proved an embarrassing diplomatic and military defeat
for Eden, who was to resign as Prime Minister early in the New Year. He was
always to claim that 'there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack
Egypt'," and he was loyally supported by Selwyn Lloyd, who confirmed that
'there was no prior agreement between us'16 when challenged on the collusion.
But neither statement was true, and both the French and the Israelis actually
possessed the written proof bearing Dean's signature. Eden did not need to
be told the implications of the document's existence and he could hardly
dissociate himself from Dean if the latter s true position as Chairman of the
JIC was ever disclosed. Of course the French and Israeli administrations had
their own reasons for concealing the truth about STRAGGLE, but what Prime
Minister would wish to continue in office as a hostage of SDECE or even of
Mossad? Eden could rely on Dean and Bridges to keep silent and destroy the
incriminating evidence of his deception, and he could depend on others, like
Sir Anthony Nutting, to remain loyal, but he knew that he could not take the
risk with the other participants in the plan.
While Eden could escape the political fallout by pleading ill-health and
retreating to tan Flemings Jamaican home for a rest, SIS had to suffer further
humiliation. Swinbum, Zarb and the rest of the ANA's network, who had
languished in Cairo's Barage Prison throughout the military activity, were
finally put on trial in May the following year. Eight Britons were charged with
espionage including Swinbum, Zarb, Charles Pittuck and John Stanley (the
local representative of the Prudential Insurance Company, who had been
an;ested a week later); the other four -Alexander Reynolds, George Sweet,
John MacGlashan and George Roe -were tried in absenKa. In addition,
there were eleven Egyptian defendants and the Yugoslav emigre, Colonel
Gregorivitch.
The trial was unusual in that as soon as it opened the defence made an
application to the judge for the evidence to be heard in camera. The request
was refused, and lengthy confessions from Swinburn and Zarb were read to the
court. The prosecution also produced all the documents seized in Swinbum's
apartment, which were more than enough to convict him and his sources. Yet
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in spite of the wealth of compromising material recovered, the Mukhabarat
never really got to the bottom of ANA's organization. This became clear
when one of the Egyptian investigators mistakenly identified 'the British
Embassy's intelligence officer, Oliver St John'," as having been SIS's master-
mind behind the network. In Eact, St John had been a colonial civil servant
before joining the Foreign Office in 1948 and, thereafter, had been exactly
what he claimed to be: a regular diplomat.
Because Britain still had no diplomatic links with Egypt there were no
diplomatic representatives at the trial, but there were two unofficial observers
present to monitor the proceedings: Colonel Cyril Banks, the Independent MP
for Pudsey, and (Lord) Edmund Davies, then the Recorder of Cardiff. The
defence lawyers put forward a whole range of arguments for their clients.
Pittuck insisted that, although he had been recruited by Gove and introduced
to Swinbum, he had not been given an opportunity to engage in espionage;
Zarb claimed he had merely passed on information from Youssef Megali
Hanna; Sayed Amin Mahmoud said that the ten sub-agents referred to in his
reports were completely fictitious, having been invented to justify his fraudu-
lent expenses; and Abdelmalik protested that his economic assessments were
nothing more than legitimate news agency articles. At the end of the trial, in
July 1957, Swinbum was sentenced to five years' hard labour and Zarb to ten
years.
Of the Egyptians, Sayed Amin Mahmoud was sentenced to death, with his
son, the naval officer, receiving twenty-five years, along with Salah Hassan
Bedeir and Youssef Megali Hanna. The detective, Massif Morkos Mikhail, got
fifteen years and a fine of $2,000. Youssef Bedeir was given ten years, as was
Alexander Reynolds, although he had already returned to England. Abdelmalik,
Ebeid, Attiya and Rewish were also sentenced to shorter terms of impris-
onment. Pittuck, Stanley, MacGlashan, Roe and el-Kashef were all acquitted.
Colonel Gregorivitch was also freed, only to be expelled as soon as the verdicts
were announced.
The trial proved to be a profound embarrassment to SIS, although some of
the claims made by the prosecution -for example, the suggestion that
Swinburn's spy-ring had been operating for more than fourteen years -were
obviously fanciful in the extreme. No doubt Mahmoud's defence that he had
invented ten notional agents and had constructed their reports, 'webs of
falsehood and imagination''" from newspaper stories, in order to defraud
Swinbum and Gove must have given someone at Broadway cause for thought,
but it did not impress the judge. Mahmoud was sentenced to hang anyway.
Undeterred by these events, SIS was still determined to get rid of Nasser
and replace him with a more sympathetic regime. Its intended instrument was
Squadron-Leader Assam el-Din Mahmoud Khalil, Chief of Intelligence for the
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Operation STRAGGLE 115
Egyptian air Eorce. Khalil had been recruited by an SIS contact, Hussein Khayri,
who had himself been Farouk's Deputy Director of Military Intelligence until
Neguib's coup. Based in Rome, and related to Farouk, Khayri had cultivated
Khalil Eor SIS and introduced him to two case officers, Major John Farmer MC
and David Crichton. Farmer had been in Rome since October 1952 and
occasionally flew to Beirut for meetings with Khalil. Officially Crichton, who
had previously served in Belgrade and Singapore, was still the accredited
British Consul in Alexandria, a cover post he had held since June 1955.
Operating from Munich, Crichton's scheme was to assassinate Nasser and
replace him with a royalist government led by Mortada el-Maraji Pasha,
Farouk's Eomler Minister of the Interior. Khalil had apparently been an enthusi-
astic participant in the plot and had himself recruited his brother-in-law, Farid
Sharif Shaker, as a courier. However, the affair came to an abrupt end on 23
December 1957, when Nasser denounced what he termed the 'restoration'
plot in a speech and revealed enough inside information to suggest that Khalil
had betrayed the entire enterprise at a very early stage. This was confirmed
when Khalil was decorated by Nasser. A military tribunal tried the plotters in
their absence in April 1958 and sentenced el-Maraji Pasha and Khayri to life
imprisonment. Three others implicated received fifteen years' hard labour.
The entire exercise cost SIS some ?162,500 in expenses and bribes paid to
Khalil in Rome and Beirut for his non-existent network. Once again, Nasser
had survived an SIS-inspired coup and, contrary to all expectations, was
destined to die a natural death.
The collapse of the ANA front, Operation MUSKETEER and the so-called
restoration plot, combined with the Buster Crabb incident, left 1956 as one of
the least memorable years in SIS's post-war history. The Friends's operations
in the Middle East were severely compromised, and the organization itself
handicapped by changes at the top. The loss of the ANA was also a setback
forcing the Middle East Controller to rethink his strategy without an Egyptian
base of operations. In fact, the Cairo Station was not to be reopened until
1961, when diplomatic relations were resumed.
The SIS officer directly involved in MUSKETEER had mixed fortunes.
Jack Easton took a regular diplomatic post in 1958, having accepted reluctantly
that being only fourteen months younger than Dick White he would never
succeed him as CSS. George Young took over as Vice-Chief, but only stayed
until 1961 when, following a clash of personalities with his new Chief, he
joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in the City of London. Norman
Derbyshire accepted atwo-year tour of duty at the Geneva Station before
returning to the Middle East as Head of Station in Bahrain. Cyril Rolo went
to Vienna as Head of Station in 1957 and Nigel Clive went to Tunis in the
same capacity the following year. The new Controller was Dickie Franks,
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~ ~ 6 The Friends
recently returned from the Tehran Station, and his deputy, Edward de Haan,
moved from Iran to Berne. And what of SIS's team in Egypt immediately
before the evacuation? The Head of Station in Cairo was switched to Berlin;
Craig Smellie, who had run the sub-station in Alexandria under Vice-Consular
cover, was transferred temporarily to Iraq to relieve Stephen de Mowbray
before being recalled to London; while Alexis Forter, SIS's ace agent-runner
in Port Said, was withdrawn to Broadway and then posted to Baghdad. In
1957, de Mowbray was removed from the scene by a posting to Montevideo,
one of SIS's diminishing South American stations. John Farmer went to Vienna
in November 1959 and David Crichton was sent to the United States.
The end of the Suez crisis marked a fuming-point for SIS. The incoming
Prime Minister, Harold Maanillan, had already expressed his distaste for
espionage, preferring in contrast to Eden not to know about SIS's illicit
activities. However, as a result of the new, supposedly foolproof, system of
offiaal clearances for all covert operations, as recommended by Lord Bridges
in his second review of the Buster Crabb affair, he had to be informed in
advance of any risky undertakings. These also had to be approved formally
by the new Foreign Office Adviser, Geoffrey McDermott. Paradoxically, the
rules had not prevented MUSKETEER from being launched because the
guidelines took no account of a Prime Minister and a Chairman of the JIC
conspiring together to prevent the rest of the Foreign Office from learning
exactly what they were contemplating. Neither Sir Patrick Dean nor the
Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, had allowed Michael Wil-
liams to know what they had in mind and he had been sent on an extended
holiday in August just as the tension was rising. His place had been taken,
nominally, by Sir Patrick Reilly, who was also not let into the secret. Kirkpatrick
retired from the Foreign Office early in the New Year of 1957, and Dean
eventually went to the United Nations and then to Washington as British
Ambassador. His involvement in the Suez affair effectively prevented him
from ever achieving his ambition of becoming Permanent Under-Secretary.
The Labour Party never discovered the full story of Eden's extraordinary
behaviour, but it was realized that Dean must have played a key role in the
affair and so his career was deliberately blocked. The scale of the deception
practised upon the Foreign Office and other Whitehall insiders is breathtaking,
even forty years after the event. Only a handful have been in a position to
team the complete story, and none have given their version of events. Sir
Evelyn Shuckburgh, for example, recalls hearing from another senior diplomat
'that he, too, thought something was going on which the FO did not know
much about, but we were not prepared for what occurred'."
Quite why Eden should have behaved as he did has never been explained.
Nutting thought his medical condition might have affected him, but another
i
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Operation STRAGGLE 117
possibility is the confidence Eden had developed for secret intelligence. During
the war years he had built up a marvellous relationship with Menzies, who
had almost been his contemporary at Eton. They had much in common: both
had been decorated with the Military Cross during the First World War in
France, where both had served on the General Staff. They mixed in the same
social circles and were both inveterate womanizers. It may well be that Eden,
having been beguiled by SIS's remarkable achievements during the war,
assumed that Menzies's successors would be capable of performing the same
feats. If so, the Crabb affair must have been a disheartening experience.
Certainly, Churchill had never endured the embarrassing experience of defend-
ing an SIS blunder on the floor of the House of Commons. Maybe, knowing
from memory what the Friends had achieved in the past, he thought that Dean
could get them to rid the world of Nasser. Certainly he was mistaken and,
having brought the Allies to the brink of war, he paid the penalty. The excuse
for his resignation was his medical condition, and his biographer, Robert
Rhodes James, was to state that Eden 'had lost his health and the premiership
as a direct result of a medical mistake'20 In Eact, Eden was to live for a further
twenty years, until January 1977.
Dick White's first two years at Broadway were marked by a succession of
crises. Virtually his last task as Director-General of MI5 had been to handle
the public controversy over Philby, and to advise the Government that there
was not sufficient evidence to show that he had been disloyal. Then, in his
new job, he had coped with the Crabb fall-out and the aftermath of Suez. His
immediate task was to restore the damaged credibility of the Friends and
rebuild the special relationship with Washington. He was also to supervise an
extraordinary purge of the organization, in a vain attempt to cleanse it of
Soviet moles, and was reluctantly to come to the conclusion that SIS had been
deeply penetrated at a very high level.
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The Penkovsky Defection
There is serious, unresolved evidence that Colonel Penkovsky was planted on
Western intelligence by the KGB.'
Anatoli Golitsyn, New Lies for Old'
'Nobody knows exactly when or exactly why the KGB first became suspicious
of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky....'
Greville Wynne, The Man from OdessaZ
'It is a misuse of words to say that SIS ran Penkovsky. It did so but, in a very
speaal sense, he ran himself.'
Anthony Verner, Through the Looking Glass'
Sir Dick White initiated numerous changes into the Friends during his twelve
years as CSS; in particular, he was to usher into the organization 'line
management', or a more obvious chain of responsibility and command. There
was little overt criticism, Eor he possessed a full mandate from Eden to make
whatever changes were necessary and was given a free rein by his successor
at 10 Downing Street, Maanillan. In any event, most of White's reforms were
recognized as long overdue. Whatever opposition there may have been
to him, it was certainly very muted, perhaps because of the absence of any
exceptionally influential old-timers at Broadway, figures like David Footman
(who had left SIS to take up an academic post at St Antony's College,
Oxford, in 1953); Dick Ellis (who had retired to Australia in the same year);
Valentine Vivian (who had retired in 1951); Maurice Jeffes (who died in
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The Penkovsky Defection > > 9
November 1954); Cuthbert Bowlby (who retired in 1955); Frank Slocum (who
went to Oslo in 1954); and Harry Carr (who was appointed to Copenhagen
in 1955). The necessity to fill senior posts overseas, away from headquarters,
ensured that there was never a chance for cabals to form, as had been so
common in MI5, and gave the Chief useful opportunities to move potential
troublemakers a satisfactory distance away from the centre. This was not
entirely a matter of expediency, or office politics, but a genuine operational
necessity to give everyone field experience at a station and then to move
them on after the regular two-year stint so as to avoid blowing their cover.
Thus, there were sound reasons for exploiting the- system to the full.
Many of the old-timers with wartime SIS experience had gone, as had some
of the SOE high-flyers like Robin Brook, who had been drafted in immediately
after the war. The senior management was in the hands of Jack Easton, who
was soon to leave, along with John Teague;.George Young, who had only a
short time to serve; and the new generation of field operators like James
Fulton, Dickie Franks, Nigel Clive and John Bruce Lockhart. Liaison with the
CIA, which for the past three years had been in the hands of Leslie Mitchell,
a veteran of the 'Shetland bus'4 Eerry service across the North Sea to Nazi-
occupied Norway, went to Machlachlan Silverwood-Cope in January 1956
when Mitchell was switched to Beme. In fact, Silverwood-Cope had already
spent five months in Washington fulfilling the same role in August 1951, when
he had been sent as a replacement for Philby who had been recalled in the
aftermath of the Burgess and Maclean defections. Up until that time Silver-
wood-Cope had nu- the Stockholm Station; in January 1952, he had
been transferred back to London, leaving his post to John Bruce Lockhart.
Silverwood-Cope had then been sent to Tokyo in November, a station he was
to head for the next three years.
The departure of the old-timers ensured that Broadway shed its time-
honoured image of cosmopolitan gentlemen amateurs, many with service
backgrounds, stabilized by boffins brought in from the academic world. The
previous generation had had few concerns about career prospects, because of
family money to fall back on, and could almost automatically draw on a fund
of wartime goodwill to ease a difficult situation or open the right door. But
the new guard were in the mould of White, not Menzies. None had known
the pre-war conditions of financial austerity imposed by a doubting Treasury;
few had any experience of anti-Bolshevik intrigues. The new intake were
university graduates recommended to intelligence because they had demon-
strated anaptitude for the work while doing their compulsory military
service. Virtually all had completed their apprenticeship in the BCCG. A tiny
handful of legendary relics of an age past, like Edward Boxshall, the pre-war
Head of Station in Bucharest, remained to be seen shuffling down corridor
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~ 20 The Friends
because of some obscure knowledge that made them indispensable. For the
greater part though, they had given way to their rivals from SOE and had
accepted SIS as an adjunct of the civil service, complete with career prospects,
two-year tours of station duty overseas and a pension scheme. Foreign accents
were out and the technocrats were in.
On the world scene, under Menzies and Sinclair, SIS had become embroiled
in a series of what might be temled rearguard actions to defend what was left
of the empire. Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Suez had all been attempts, with
varying degrees of success, to stave off the inevitable and, as far as the Soviet
Union was concerned, had been mere side-shows. Covert operations such as
those launched in Albania and the Baltic had floundered, and very little had
been achieved in the technical field following the enforced termination of the
telephone-tapping operations in Vienna and Berlin. Indeed, if the Hungarian
uprising and the unrest in East Gemtany were anything to go by, SIS
had missed some important opportunities by being distracted elsewhere.
Broadway's preoccupation with Operation STRAGGLE had effectively pre-
vented any profitable manipulation of the growing anti-Soviet resentment felt
in the satellite countries of the Eastern Bloc. Clearly it was time for SIS to go
on to the offensive. However, apart from the occasional technical projects
against individual Soviet diplomatic missions, there had not been any real
prospect of a breakthrough. That depressing status quo altered late in 1960.
Certainly, SIS's performance when fielded against the Soviets in the post-
warera had been less than promising. Of the two significant, high-grade Soviet
defector received, Colonels Tasoev and Tokaev, the former had changed his
mind within hours of his arrival in London. There had been a couple of low-
level turncoats from the Soviet occupation forces in Vienna and Berlin, but
they had only been able to supply relatively unimportant material with a short
'shelf-life ;such as the identities of intelligence personnel operating undercover
locally. Since Tokaev's memorable escape from Berlin in 1948, SIS had failed
to attract a single worthwhile defector. On at least three occasions when it
looked rather as though a recruitment had gone according to plan, the schemes
had misfired. Philby's subsequent behaviour provided an eloquent explanation
for at least the first; the second was to remain unexplained for some years to
come.
The abortive defection of Konstantin Volkov had taken place back in
September 1945, when the NKV D major had made contact with the British
Consulate in Istanbul. Volkov had offered to switch sides and betray several
Soviet moles in Britain in return for a financially secure future. The proposal
had ended up on Philby's desk at Broadway, and by the time he had made
his way to Turkey to complete the arrangements Volkov had disappeared,
apparently having been forcibly returned to Russia. Philby's report on the
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The Penkovsky Defection 12~
incident blamed poor security in the local station and suggested that an
indiscretion on an open telephone line may have tipped off the other side. In
reality, of course, Philby must have alerted his own London-based case officer
to the danger long before he had set out to meet Volkov.
There was a similar episode the following year, when a Soviet lieutenant
named Skripkin had approached a British naval attache in the Far East with a
view to defecting. The Soviet intended to return to Moscow to collect his
wife and then make his escape with her on his next overseas assignment. The
Naval Intelligence Division had routinely passed the matter on to the Friends,
but Skripkin never turned up in the West. The reason was later disclosed by
yet another defector, a KGB lieutenant-colonel named Yuri Rastvorov, who
had made contact with another British naval attache, Commander Michael
Tufnell RN DSC, in Tokyo, late in 1953, but who had eventually opted to
go to the CIA. During his subsequent debriefing, Rastvorov alleged that
Skripkin had been trapped in Moscow by the KGB, which had sent two
counter-intelligence experts around to his apartment masquerading as SIS
officers from the Moscow Station. Skripkin had accepted them as genuine,
and, in so doing, had inadvertently incriminated himself. He had promptly
been arrested and liquidated. The affair, however, had received wide circulation
in Soviet intelligence circles and had proved a powerful deterrent to those
contemplating defection. According to Rastvorov, it was common knowledge
that both the British services, MI5 and SIS, were thoroughly compromised.
Judging by the experience of Volkov and Skripkin, there was good reason to
suspect hostile penetration of the Friends. Indeed, Rastvorov's motive for
changing his mind about defecting to the British in January 1954 was his
declared fear of betrayal. The deal he had negotiated had stipulated resettlement
and debriefing in Australia, and emphatically not in a British colony; it was
only when he realized that his RAF transport had filed a flight plan from
Tokyo to Singapore that he had fled to the US Embassy. He later told the
CIA that he had anticipated being kidnapped in Singapore.
In spite of Rastvorov's testimony, which was entirely hearsay, SIS did not
immediately launch a molehunt to investigate his claims. After all, there was
only his word for it that the KGB had played the charade on Skripkin in
Moscow; there was every chance that Skripkin had somehow betrayed himself.
As for Volkov, the incident was not recognized for what it was, a manifestation
of Philby's treachery, until January 1963 when he was persuaded to write a
confession. Thus, in 1960, when the Moscow Station got the offer of a
defector-in-place, it responded with enthusiasm. It was both an opportunity
to make up for lost ground and a real chance to prove that the organization
was free from hostile penetration. After all, a successful case was the best
possible proof of the integrity of an intelligence service's security.
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The offer came from Lieutenant-Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a senior GRU
oKicer who had already made two unsuccessful approaches to the CIA and
the Canadians. His first attempt, to the US Embassy in Moscow, had been
rejected on the advice of the CIA's counter-intelligence branch as a blatant
provocation. Penkovsky had been flagged as a GRU officer some years earlier
when he had served in Turkey as a military attache after the war, but had
not taken the opportunity then to make any moves. However, apparently
undeterred, he then made a bid to supply information to the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police through a Canadian named Oliver Van Vleit, who had close
connections with the Department of External Affairs. This, too, had been
fumed down; in desperation he turned to the SIS Station at the British Embassy,
which at that time was headed by Roderick (Ruari) Chisholm, aRussian-
speaking graduate of St Catherine's College, Cambridge, who had taken over
the Moscow Station in May 1960, following four years in Berlin and two in
Singapore. While serving in the army after the war, Chisholm had spent nearly
two years in Berlin as a liaison officer with the Soviet forces.
The decision to post Chisholm into the lion's den was an interesting change
in policy because previous Heads of Station had been blown' almost as soon
as they had arrived. One of his predecessors, for example, had run the Czech
desk at Broadway while Philby had still been active, so his cover had been
almost completely superfluous. As for running or recruiting agents in Moscow,
SIS had long since given up trying because of the impossibly hostile environ-
ment.KGB surveillance was so comprehensive that even the most casual social
contacts with local residents automatically precipitated unwelcome activity.
Routine fieldcraft, such as conducting surveys for dead-letter drops and suitable
clandestine meeting-places, was a complete waste of time. There was a KGB
informer on virtually every street corner and foreigners were far too con-
spicuous ever to lose their watchers by taking the kind of counter-surveillance
measures that invariably worked in Western cities. No sooner was one watcher
team shaken off, than another appeared in its place. In addition, the movements
of all diplomats were restricted, so that there were few opportunities to engage
in large-scale decoy tactics to confound the opposition. Blanket technical
coverage of all the telephones, diplomatic premises, hotels and apartment
blocks also made life difficult for the intelligence officer used to emptying and
replenishing dead-letter drops or even holding the occasional rendezvous with
an agent. In truth, the KGB was never short of resources on its own territory
and used its advantage to the full. Instead of engaging in the usual liaison and
reporting duties normally undertaken by an SIS station, the Friends in Moscow
were obliged to confine themselves to giving aid and comfort to the steady
stream of English businessmen compromised in honeytraps, and processing
the visa applications made by Soviet citizens. After several false starts, the
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The Penkovsky Defection 123
CIA Station in Moscow had also concluded that running agents in the Soviet
capital was an unprofitable business. Its last good case, a GRU major named
Piotr Popov, had been arrested in October 1959 while in the act of passing a
surreptitious message to his case officer. The American had claimed his right
to diplomatic immunity and had been released, but his agent had not been so
lucky: he had been thrown live into a furnace in front of an audience of his
GRU colleagues.
Penkovsky's fortuitous appearance in 1960 was particularly welcome
because, as well as being highly placed, he held out the promise of relatively
safe personal contact with an SIS case officer. The logistics of arranging a
secret rendezvous in Moscow were impossibly dangerous, but Penkovsky's
job on the State Committee for Scientific Co-ordination took him abroad quite
regularly. Thus, it was reckoned that if direct contact with Penkovsky was
limited to meetings held on his overseas trips, there was a good chance that
he might be run for some time. Accordingly, one of SIS's stable of businessmen,
the 'honourable correspondents' who had volunteered to undertake occasional
missions for the Friends, was assigned the task of acting as a cut-out between
Penkovsky and SIS until a visit to London could be set up. These individuals
were held in deep contempt by Philby. He was later to recall:
There are, of course, British residents abroad, businessmen, journalists and
so on, who are prepared to stick their necks out. There was a Swinbume
[sicJ and a Wynne. But these are usually the lesser fry and their potentialities
are limited. The big men, with their big potentialities, are usually unhelpful.
They have too much to lose; they have duties to themselves, to their
Families; they even have duties to their damned shareholders. They would
usually agree to pass on anything that 'came their way' -invariably
valueless gossip. But patriotism was not etlough to induce them to take
the risks involved in the systematic search for intelligences
The agent chosen to link up with Penkovsky was Greville Wynne, aforty-
one-year-old engineer who ran his own small export agency with his wife
from his home in Upper Cheyne Row, Chelsea. He had a useful portfolio of
client companies whom he represented at trade exhibitions abroad, including
one or two firms who had agreed to appoint Wynne to work on their behalf
after a discreet approach to the chairman from the Friends. Wynne's business
was ideal cover and also enabled SIS to monitor the activities of other British
salesmen working regularly behind the Iron Curtain. It was during one of
Wynne's visits to Moscow, in December 1960, that he introduced himself to
Penkovsky on the pretext of Finalizing the details of an official Soviet trade
delegation tour of England scheduled for the following year.
The Russian group was to be led by Penkovsky, and elaborate preparations
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were made to debrief him without arousing the suspicion of the ubiquitous
KGB security officer who invariably accompanied all such groups. When the
Russian party checked into the Mount Royal Hotel at Marble Arch on ZO
April 1961, SIS had already taken over a large suite on the floor above and
installed all the necessary recording equipment. On five separate occasions
Penkovsky slipped away from his colleagues and made his way upstairs to be
debriefed by George Kisevalter, the CIA officer assigned to the case, who was
himself Russian in origin, and Harold Shergold, Wynne's contact in the Friends.
Shergold had been educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and Corpus Christi,
Cambridge, and, like Dick White, had become a schoolmaster. In 1940, after
three years' teaching at Cheltenham Grammar School, he had joined up with
the Hampshire Regiment and had switched to the Intelligence Corps within a
year. After a tour of duty with SIME, Shergold had followed many of his
colleagues into the Friends and had spent seven years Winning agents in
Germany. Now he was to organize one of SIS's most important agent
operations ever.
Penkovsky made a second visit to London in July 1961 and was taken to
two safe-houses: a flat in Coleheme Court, in west London, and a borrowed
country house. There he was introduced briefly to Dick White, and they
chatted for about ten minutes. Although Penkovsky never knew his name, he
was later to recall that 'I guessed he was the chief by the behaviour of the
others in the room' ? He also met Janet Chisholm, Ruari's wife, who was to
act as his cut-out in Moscow. The arrangements made for exchanging messages
were complicated, but demonstrated the care needed to prevent attracting the
KGB's attention in Moscow. Whenever Penkovsky had something to report,
he was to telephone a local number on a Monday morning and hang up after
an agreed number of rings. The signal would be.received by Lieutenant-
Commander John Varley RN, the British Assistant Naval Attache, who would
relay Penkovsky's wish for a meeting to the Head of Station, or his secretary,
Felidty Stuart. Janet Chisholm would then go to a prearranged, innocuous
rendezvous, where Penkovsky would give one of the Chisholm children a box
of sweets containing a batch of exposed Minox microfilms. This sophisticated
system avoided the kind of direct contact between Ruari Chisholm and
Penkovsky that might have jeopardized them. The box of sweets and an
envelope containing a picture of Janet Chisholm with her son and two
daughters had been handed over to Wynne by Chisholm in Moscow; Wynne
had then given them to Penkovsky in the cloakroom of the Bolshoi Theatre's
restaurant while apparently attending a French trade fair in the Soviet capital.
Later in 1961, after his two trips to London, Penkovsky went on an official
visit to Paris and was met at the airport by Wynne, to whom he handed fifteen
rolls of film. He then attended a debriefing session at two safe-houses arranged
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The Penkovsky Defection 125
by the CIA Station Chief, Al Ulmer. He also took in all the usual tourist sights
with Wynne, including Versailles and the shows at the Moulin Rouge and the
Lido.
In spite of initial scepticism on the part of the CIA, Penkovsky was quickly
recognized as a truly extraordinary source. His unique value was twofold: his
willingness to continue working as an agent, instead of opting to become a
defector, escaping abroad; and his access to vital, top-level Soviet secrets.
Penkovsky's determination to remain in place was probably influenced by
family considerations: his daughter was at school in Moscow and his wife was
pregnant, making it impossible for her to accompany him abroad.
Penkovsky's fortuitous appearance was extremely significant in political
terms because the operation was being conducted during a period of unpre-
cedented international tension, with the Berlin Wall suddenly being erected
virtually overnight on I2 August 1941. Penkovsky was able to provide an
insider's view of the Politburo's decision-making processes and offer his own
opinions on particular events. He was also exceptionally well informed about
Soviet strategic forces through a close family friend, Marshal Varentsov, who
happened to command all the Soviet missile troops and artillery. Thanks to
Varentsov's apparent indiscretion, Penkovsky supplied authentic intelligence
about rocket strengths and other crucial matters -information that had been
denied to the West since May 1960, when President Eisenhower had been
forced to ban all future U-Z overflights following the loss of the American
pilot Gary Powers. Without aerial reconnaissance photographs, the West had
been left virtually blind in terms of assessing the deployment of Soviet ballistic
missiles. Penkovsky's information, codenamed ARNIKA, appeared to be both
genuine and timely.
When Penkovsky returned to Moscow after his third trip overseas in 1961,
his management was shared between Chisholm and Hugh Montgomery, an
American case officer assigned by the local CIA Station Chief. Much the same
routine was followed. When arranging to fill an agreed dead-letter drop,
Penkovsky would telephone Captain Alexis Davison, the US Assistant Air
Attache, who would empty the cache left in the prearranged hiding-place.
These precautions worked well into the summer of 1963, when Penkovsky
began to show the strain of his double life. At his last rendezvous with Wynne,
held at the Peking Restaurant in July, he insisted that he had detected KGB
surveillance and was increasingly nervous about the new case officers scheduled
to take over from Chisholm and Montgomery. In August the Chisholms were
to be replaced by Gervase Cowell, and Montgomery was due a stint at
headquarters before moving to Rome. Chisholm returned to Broadway for
two years before going back into the field, returning to Singapore in 1964.
His replacement, Gervase Cowell, had joined SIS in 1951 (and had, therefore,
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126 The Friends
never come into contact with Philby), followed by three years in Germany
under BCCG cover. In 1958, he had gone to Amman for atwo-year tour. His
new task in Moscow was to keep Penkovsky out of the clutches of the KGB,
but by the time he took over that was a forlorn hope.
Penkovsky's new CIA case officer was Rodney W. Carlson, listed at the
US Embassy as an assistant agricultural attache. He managed to arrange three
meetings with his agent, all at diplomatic receptions, but both men were
uneasy. Penkovsky's claim to have spotted KGB surveillance had caused
considerable disquiet and, as an added security measure, it had been agreed
that Penkovsky should leave a mark on a particular lamppost on Kutuzovsky
Prospekt if he had filled his dead-letter drop at 5 Pushkin Street. This would
avoid fruitless visits to the spot, which was actually a small box suspended
on a wire behind a radiator in a doorway just off an alley. Meanwhile, Peter
Deriabin, a KGB officer who had defected in Vienna in 1954, was invited to
review the case Files at the CIA's headquarters and assess whether penkovsky's
fears seemed justified.' He was still considering the matter when, on 22
October, Carlson received his agent's telephone signal. He promptly sent
Captain Davison round to Kutozovsky Prospekt to check the lamppost and,
having had that confirmation, assigned a young secretarial assistant, Richard
C. Jacob, to empty the dead-letter drop in Pushkin Street. No sooner had Jacob
reached behind the radiator than he was arrested by KGB officials. Jacob was
expelled and Carlson left the country before he could be declared persona non
graEa.
Evidently Penkovsky was in serious trouble, but contingency plans had
been made to allow him to escape to the West. Carlson had given him a
forged Soviet identity card, and there was an outside chance that he might be
able to make his way to Budapest, where Wynne was taking his new mobile
exhibition, essentially a caravan custom-built to demonstrate British engin-
eering equipment. Wynne travelled to Romania from Vienna and then drove
into Hungary on 3I October. However, instead of finding Penkovsky, he was
aaested by the Hungarian security police on Z November and shipped straight
to the Luliyanka Prison in Moscow. The announcement of his arrest was made
four days later, which was followed on I I December by a statement describing
Penkovsky's arrest. An article in Pravda on I6 December, entitled 'Caught
Red-Handed', confirmed the KGB's intervention and even carried a photograph
of the hapless Captain Davison checking the lamppost in Kutuzovsky Prospekt
for Penkovsky's signal. It was later disclosed that a secret compartment had
been found hidden inside Penkovsky's desk at home and that a Sanyo short-
wave radio, three Minox cameras and other espionage paraphernalia had been
recovered.
The end of the operation was a devastatingly bitter blow for both SIS and
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the CIA. The two organizations had achieved an unprecedented level of co-
operation, with Maurice Oldfield, as Head of Station in Washington since
1960, managing to rebuild much of the mutual trust that had been so effectively
undermined by one of his predecessors, Philby. Penkovsky had become a
symbol of the CIA and SIS's joint approach to the Soviet challenge. Now the
whole undertaking was suddenly placed in jeopardy, but it could hardly be
said that the development was unexpected. Penkovsky had been under appal-
ling strain and, towards the end, had been close to reckless in his attempts to
communicate with his case officers at diplomatic receptions. He had made
contact with Carlson three times in such circumstances and had used an
ingeniously-converted container of Harpic lavatory cleanser at the British
Embassy to keep in touch with Gervase and Pamela Cowell. When invited to
functions at the Embassy, he would slip into the toilet and place his exposed
Minox microfilms into the tin tube of disinfectant, ready Eor one of the'Cowells
to collect it later. Penkovsky had certainly acknowledged KGB surveillance, but
none of his handlers had been able to ascertain whether this was understandable
paranoia, or iE he really had good reason to believe that he had come under
suspicion. From SIS's viewpoint, the only remaining matter was to determine
exactly when Penkovsky had been compromised and establish whether any
of his last messages had been written under the KGB's control. This damage
limitation exercise was to prove extremely controversial, with Harold Shergold
for one remaining insistent that Penkovsky had never been operated as a
conduit for disinformation, even at the close.
Apart from expelling those case officers who had not already left Moscow,
the K G B made little response to the affair, except Eor a rather heavy-handed
attempt in March 1963 to honeytrap Ivor Rowsell, a transport clerk at the
British Embassy who had moved into John Varley's Aat after the latter s
departure the previous June. Rowsell reported the incident immediately and
was withdrawn without delay.
The four-day trial of Penkovsky and Wynne opened in Moscow early in
May the following year, with both men pleading guilty to various charges of
treason and espionage. Evidently Penkovsky, who resembled something of a
zombie in the dock had given an extremely detailed confession to the KGB;
in his testimony on the first day he said that over a period he had passed more
than a hundred rolls of film, each with fifty exposures, to his Western contacts.
He described having met Janet Chisholm nine times and said that fifteen of
the films had been handed directly to Wynne. Throughout this evidence the
prosecutor fumed constantly to Wynne for his confirmation, which he gave.
On a couple of occasions there were some odd exchanges between the two
defendants, each accusing the other of misleading the court. For example,
Penkovsky insisted that Wynne had asked him to write a biographical account
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of himself 'for British intelligence', but this was denied by Wynne, who asserted
that 'Penkovsky's testimony is not correct'.8 This was obviously part of
Wynne's determined effort to present himself as an unwitting accomplice in
Penkovsky's treachery rather than as a willing instrument of British intelligence.
On the following day, 8 May, Wynne took over as the principal witness
and gave his version of events. He described himself as an ordinary businessman
who had visited Moscow five times between December 1960 and July 1962,
and told of his encounters with Chisholm at the Embassy. According to
Wynne, he had been approached by Penkovsky in April 1961 (and not the
previous December) with a request to be put in touch with the authorities in
London. He claimed that a security officer named Hartley, who had worked
for one of his client engineering companies, had introduced him to 'Ackroyd
of the Foreign Office. I have since heard that he was a member of the British
Intelligence.' After lunch at a restaurant, Ackroyd had introduced a certain
Roger King to Wynne, and later a third person, their chief, who had completed
the recruitment. 'I thought they were from the Foreign Office and very
trustworthy gentlemen,' said Wynne. He had received 'assurances from King's
and Ackroyd's chief, a very powerful figure, that this was nothing to do with .
espionage'. Wynne claimed to have been threatened by King:
He said that my business would suffer if I did not help and they would
make things very difficult for me in England.... I was very concerned
because, knowing official people, it is quite possible that they would pick
up the telephone and speak to the directors of my companies, and just
one little word might give a bad impression of me.... I did not want to
risk that. I have spent my life building up my own business:
Asked whether he had been deceived by his fellow countrymen, Wynne
replied, 'Yes, indeed they did. That is why I am here. A thousand miles from
here there are my own people -responsible people -who have landed me in
this dock''
Wynne s claim to have worked in this 'dirty business' under duress, having
been 'deceived, threatened and blackmailed', earned him aneight-year prison
term, five to be spent in a labour camp, while Penkovsky received a death
sentenee, confiscation of his property and deprivation of his military rank The
announcement of Penkovsky's execution by firing squad was made on 16
May, but this was far from the end of the Penkovsky affair. The Cowells were
declared personae non graEae, as were the remaining CIA personnel named
during the trial. In April 1964, eleven months after Penkovsky's death, Wynne
was swopped at Checkpoint Heerstrasse in Berlin for Konon Molody, the
KGB 'illegal' known as 'Gordon Lonsdale' who had been arrested in London
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The Penkovsky Defection ~ 29
in January 1961 along with the rest of the Portland spy ring: Harry Houghton,
Ethel Gee and the Krogers.
Once Wynne had been returned to Britain, to RAF Northolt from Gatow
in Berlin, and had made a recovery from the mental breakdown he experienced
upon his release, he became a thorough pest to SIS. As soon as he learned
that a book called The Penkovsky Papers was being prepared, he demanded his
right to add a foreword. Reluctantly he was given permission to do so, on
condition that he did not compromise his public standing as an innocent
businessman. The result was a brief, bland contribution to a book which,
having been edited heavily by Peter Deriabin and Frank Gibney, the Newsweek
and Time journalist, was predictably denounced as a poor reconstruction of
Penkovsky's real autobiography. The Penkovsky Papers, combined with the
publication in the same year of Spy by Gordon Lonsdale, led Wynne to write
his own account, entitled The Man from Moscow, in December 1967. The
prospect was greeted with horror by the Friends, but the book proved to be
less embarrassing than had been anticipated, with Shergold's true identity
concealed after a little discreet pressure had been applied. He was simply
referred to as 'James' and described as one 'of my friends in Intelligence, the
men whose Christian names were false and whose surnames I never knew'.10
Shergold's colleague 'Roger King ; who had been named in the trial in
Moscow, was also protected. Far from being the domineering thug who had
coerced him into co-operating, Wynne revealed that 'the villain is a British
agent whom I will call Robbins. He was a charming man who never bullied
me at all.'" This belated attempt to avoid identifying King was not entirely
successful because, apart from an initial introduction to 'Robbins ;the text also
mentioned a certain 'Roger' whose exact role was unexplained. Sharp-eyed
readers must have wondered why Wynne had been persuaded to change
Rogers surname from King to Robbins, unless the first was indeed his true
name. Robbins' and Roger King', of course, was actually Andrew King, one
time Head of Station in Vienna, Controller of the German stations, joint head
of Operation PRINCE and, up until 1961, Head of Station in Hong Kong.
King had originally joined SIS before the war and had operated under
commercial cover in Austria before being taken on to the British consular staff
in Switzerland upon the French collapse in 1940. Educated at Wellington and
Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a lifelong bachelor, he had been
acquainted with Philby at university and had joined the Communist Party of
Great Britain. Although he never went to any lengths to conceal his inclinations
or his political past, he was to become the victim of an MI5-inspired purge
when he eventually came to retire in 1967 at the relatively early age of fifty-
seven.
The Penkovsky operation effectively compromised the Chisholms and, in
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130 The Friends
1964, Ruari returned briefly to Singapore. In 1970, he was posted to South
Africa for four years as Head of Station and later served a second term at
Pretoria in 1977. While there he wrote Ladysmith, an acclaimed account of the
Boer War siege, but at the end of his tour, en route to London, he caught a
particularly malignant form of malaria in Dar-es-Salaam. He later died in
Scotland, his second, promising career as a military historian unfulfilled. The
Cowells, who were also named at the trial, were posted to Bonn the following
year; they later went on to serve at the Paris and Tel Aviv Stations.
Wynne himself never recovered from his experience in Russia and became
obsessed with the Penkovsky case. Both his marriages ended in divorce and,
after a lengthy battle against alcoholism, he eventually ended up cultivating
roses in the Spanish island resort of Mallorca. In 1981 he published a second
version of his original book, The Man from Odessa, in which he claimed to
have played a vital role in the defection of a GRU major named Sergei Kuznov
in 1959. In fact, no such person ever existed. He also claimed to have
accompanied Penkovsky on a secret visit to Washington, where they had met
President Kennedy. In reality, all that had happened was that Wynne had
succumbed to what might be termed 'post-usefulness syndrome', a craving for
attention, especially Erom the media. The official comment on Wynne's first
book was simply that 'certain passages ... would almost certainly have been
objectionable on security grounds, had they been true'.'Z
Penkovsky's own veracity was also to be challenged during the course of
the post mortem, which was held routinely in order to see if any lessons could
be learned from the operation. The first part of the inquest consisted of a joint
CIA-SIS counter-intelligence review to establish exactly when and how the
Soviets had tumbled to Penkovsky. This never reached a satisfactory conclusion
because the evidence was so conflicting. There were, of course, the initial fears
as expressed by Penkovsky himself, which had prompted Deriabin's abortive
study of the problem. Then there was the occasionally obvious manifestation
of hostile surveillance spotted by Wynne and Penkovsky. The difficulty was
to decide whether the deployment of watchers in Moscow was normal
coverage, or something more unusual which might have indicated the KGB's
sudden interest.
poring Wynne's debriefing, he revealed that the KGB had taped fragments
of conversations he had held with Penkovsky in the Ukraine Hotel, months
before their arrest. If Penkovsky had come under suspicion at such an early
stage, had he ever been run, willingly or unconsciously, as a double agent?
As the experts pondered these conundrums, more evidence accumulated to
undemline Shergold's star agent. According to Yuri Nosenko, a KGB defector
to the CIA, Penkovsky's original approaches to the US Embassy and the
Canadians in 1961 must have been monitored and could not have been
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The Penkovsky Defection 131
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overlooked. He insisted that the room in which an American diplomat had first
rebuffed Penkovsky's offer to work as a spy contained a hidden microphone. He
also suggested that the KGB had the technical means to filter the sound of
voices from a background of running water, the standard counter-measure
used by Wynne and Penkovsky when they met in hotel bathrooms. So why
had Penkovsky been allowed to continue contact with the West until his
eventual recruitment? Questions were also raised about the intelligence product
itself. It was undoubtedly of the highest quality and conveniently timely, but
it did cause the military strategists to rethink their assessments of Soviet
strength and, in particular, end the then-popular concept of the 'missile gap',
Russian numerical superiority in ballistic weaponry. According to Penkovsky,
the Soviets were lagging behind the West in nuclear technology, did not pose
a real threat and had 'no existing means of combating enemy missiles'." Such
information might have been a trifle academic if events had turned out
differently, arid Khrushchev had not been planning to site Soviet missiles in
Cuba during Penkovsky's most active period. There was certainly a plausible
case to be made for portraying Penkovsky as a conduit for disinformation, a
kind of clandestine, direct contact between the Kremlin and the West's most
influential military analysts.
Neither George Kisevalter nor Harold Shergold would entertain such a
proposition, but the fact that the matter had been raised at all was enough to
ensure that Penkovsky's case was to some extent tainted. When the CIA's
counter-intelligence specialists conducted their own examination, they found
more apparent inconsistencies. For example, the intelligence product code-
namedRUPEE, which identified Penkovsky's GRU colleagues operating under
diplomatic cover around the globe, failed to expose a single GRU 'illegal'.
Although RUPEE seemed to present a fascinating insight into the GRU's
activities, it was quite worthless in operational terms. There were also reser-
vations expressed about Penkovsky's modus oyerandi. He had purloined
original rocket training manuals, instead of photographing the contents and
replaang the documents so that they would not be missed. In the view of
some officers, such behaviour could not go undetected for long. There was also
Penkovsky's remarkable agility with a miniature camera, and his extraordinary
access to classified material outside his limited sphere of responsibility. Were
the Soviets guilty of appalling recklessness when it came to physical security,
or was there a more sinister explanation? One body of opinion reckoned that
the breach was on such a scale as to be uncharacteristic; the other insisted that
bureaucratic, departmental rivalries, together with Penkovsky's rank and his
useful family connections, delayed the KGB's intervention until very late in
the affair.
None of these matters have been fully resolved although the more extreme
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ideas, like the suggestion that Penkovsky had always been a sophisticated
provocation or instrument of disinformation, have been rejected by those who
have obtained confirmation from secret sources that he was indeed executed
when the announcement was made in Moscow. Nevertheless, the suspicion
of awell-orchestrated plot proved durable. The West lost many strategic
advantages during the relevant period. The Berlin Wall had been constructed
and Khrushchev had demanded the removal of the American Jupiter missiles
from Turkey in return for the Soviet withdrawal from Cuba. President Kennedy
had also been forced into giving a humiliating guarantee of Castro's regime
in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In human temts,
Wynne, SIS's civilian cut-out, had been swopped for awell-trained, long-term
Soviet illegal', Konon Molody. It had hardly been a Eair trade. Whichever way
you looked at the critical months of 1961 to the end of 1962, the Kremlin
seemed to come out on top. Yet SIS insisted on sticking to the belief that
Penkovsky represented a major breakthrough.
Re-examining the Penkovsky affair later, it was noted that two items tended
to stand out. One was the remarkable achievement of sustaining the operation
for so long, given the necessarily very wide distribution of ARNIKA and
RUPEE. Penkovsky's continued freedom from KGB interference could be
interpreted by some as an indication, or even proof, of the integrity of all the
Western intelligence agencies involved. After all, it would not have required
enormous powers of deduction Eoreven amiddle-ranking mole to have realized
from the sheer volume of high-grade Russian material that the CIA and/or
SIS had acquired an extremely useful Soviet source. The corollary was that
both organizations must have been free of penetration. It was also noticed
that Penkovsky had expressed a view of the Berlin tunnel, which he had
described as 'a very serious failure on the part of Soviet counter-intelligence'."
How could such an opinion be justified in the face of overwhelming evidence
pointing to the existence of an as yet unsuspected Soviet mole, active deep
inside the Friends; someone who had actually supervised the technical aspects
of Operation PRINCE? If a proven spy had been indoctrinated into the secrets
of the tunnel right at the start of the project, how could Penkovsky say that
'many important secrets and much valuable information had fallen into enemy
hands?
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The Blake Catastrophe
'Born in Holland, the son of an Egyptian Jew, Blake was the "odd man out" in
the cliquish world of British intelligence.'
David C. Martin, Wilderness of Minors'
Word that SIS had been penetrated at a high level by yet another Soviet spy
was first given by the CIA's Soviet Bloc Division in 1959. An anonymous
source, codenamed SNIPER, had already proved his bona fides by supplying
enough information to indirectly incriminate Harry Houghton, the KGB's
agent inside the Admiralty sensitive Underwater Weapons Research Estab-
lishment at Portland. MI5 had handled that investigation, which eventually
resulted in the convictions of Houghton, his girlfriend Ethel Gee, and their
illegal contact, Konon Molody. Lengthy surveillance on Molody had led to
Moms and Lona Cohen, who had adopted the identities of Peter and Helen
Kroger and had nin a wireless station in west London to communicate
Houghton s secrets to Moscow. All five had been arrested on 7 January 1961.
SNIPER wrote a total of fourteen letters, in rather poor German, to the
CIA. The first was addressed to the American Ambassador in Switzerland
and, once contact had been established, the rest were picked up from pre-
arranged dead-letter drops in Warsaw. In one message, dated November 1959,
he claimed that up until recently the KGB had been in receipt of material from
someone in the Friends known by the cryptonym DIAMOND. He later
mentioned that he had actually examined three SIS papers. At first there had
been some scepticism about the story, until it was realized that SNIPER'S
description of the three documents was sufficiently precise to identify them. He
had accurately recalled particular internal documents which had not circulated
outside SIS. For example, SNIPER gave an authentic account of SIS's annual
R Sections Report for 1959. This, key list itemized the needs of each of the R
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134 The Friends
Sections Eor the coming year and could easily be analysed to reveal SIS's
relative strengths and weaknesses. The second document was a Warsaw
Station list of likely Polish prospects ?Eor recruitment by a specialist unit.
The third was an extract from the annual brief from R6's Polish Section. Where
had they all come from? The problem was made all the more difficult because
the CIA had no idea who their anonymous correspondent really was. They
guessed that he was in the Polish Intelligence Bureau, the LIrutd Bezpieczenstwa
or UB, but they could not be completely sure.
SIS's immediate priority was to establish how SNIPER had acquired three
of its documents, and a molehunt was launched to track down DIAMOND.
There were only a Eew clues to narrow the field: much of SNIPER'S authentic
knowledge seemed to be either Polish or German in origin, which suggested
a leak from either Warsaw or one of the German field stations. In addition,
some significance was attached to the fact that it had been derived from the
1959 R Sections Report, rather than the one Eor the current year. There were
about ten possible candidates who fitted DIAMOND'S profile, and each
was investigated by MI5 and cleared. After further enquiries, the molehunt
concluded that the most likely source for the leak had been a burglary at Guy
Bratt's station in Brussels some three years earlier in 1957. Certain routine
security precautions had revealed that the Head of Station's office safe had
been tampered with, and it had been assumed at the time that the contents
had been compromised. No definite record had been kept of all the papers lost
in the burglary, so there was no proof that all of SNIPER'S information had
come from this incident. However, MI5 concurred that the break-in at Brussels
was the most likely source for SNIPER'S information.
This assessment was changed early in 1961 when SNIPER was suddenly
made available to SIS in America. He had turned up in Berlin on Christmas
Day and had requested political asylum foe himself and his German girlfriend,
Irmgard ICampf. They had been flown on a military aircraft from Frankfurt to
Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on II January 1961 accompanied
by SNIPER'S CIA case officer, Howard Roman. Once in America, SNIPER
had been driven to a secluded country estate in Maryland for intensive
debriefing. It was there, on 16 January, that he answered the detailed questions
put to him by Maurice Old6eld and Harold Shergold. SNIPER was revealed
to be Michal Goleniewski, alieutenant-colonel in the UB who had also acted
as an informant for the KGB. Instead of simply liaising with the KGB, as he
was required to do as head of the UB's industrial and scientific branch, he had
actually worked for them as an active agent. During his frequent contacts with
his KGB handlers information had passed in both directions, so Goleniewski
was well qualified to disclose knowledge of both UB and KGB operations.
Before his defection, he had even stashed several hundred documents in a
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The 8/ake Catastrophe 135
hollow tree in Warsaw. Once these had been retrieved by the CIA, they
disclosed even more data and served to establish his credentials. From SIS's
viewpoint, the conclusion was inescapable: the Friends had sustained an
appalling haemorrhage of highly classified secrets. It seemed likely that SNI-
PER'S position had necessarily restricted his indoctrination to material directly
relevant to Polish affairs, in which case it was possible that the KGB had
actually acquired a better source with much wider access. In all probability,
SIS had been penetrated at a senior level and the burglary in Brussels was no
longer a valid explanation for the loss of the documents. Shergold returned
to London determined to identify the traitor, and a new molehunt was
launched.
In February 1961, immediately following the start of the second molehunt
for DIAMOND, further incriminating evidence was provided by the West
German BEV. One of the ten original candidates suspected of having leaked
SNIPER'S three reports had been a successful young SIS officer named George
Blake. He had been investigated, but had been given a clean bill of health by
the molehunters. However, according to the BEV, one of Blake's star agents
in Berlin had fumed out to be a double agent controlled by the KGB, who,
after his arrest, had identified Blake as having collaborated with him. Horst
Eitner had been working Eor both sides in the agentensumpf since 1955, but
had evaded capture until October 1960 when the BfV finally amassed enough
evidence to charge him with his duplicity. After several months in custody,
Eitner saw the weight of the prosecution's case against him and offered a deal.
He declared himself willing to incriminate his KGB contact, whom he had
known as Max de Vries, in return for lenient treatment from the authorities.
'Max de Vries' had been Blake's cover name during his tenure at the Berlin
Station and, as soon as Eitner's allegation reached Broadway, Blake was
reinvestigated.
Blake's record was unusual, for under SIS's regulations all officers were
required not only to have British citizenship, but to have been born in England.
This rule had been waived on the authority of the Director of Personnel,
Kenneth Cohen, when Blake had been offered a permanent post in SIS at the
end of the.waz.
Blake's file showed him to have been an ideal member of SIS's waztime
Dutch country section and a skilled linguist, fluent in French, German and
Dutch. In April 1945, he had been seconded to Naval Intelligence in Hamburg
to assist in the interrogation of U-boat crews. In October 1947, he had enrolled
in aRussian-language sandwich course at Downing College, Cambridge, and,
on I September 1948, had been sent to Seoul under consular cover to open
SIS's first station in Korea.
Blake had non the Seoul Station from the British Legation's compound at
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136 The Friends
Chongdong until late June 1950, when he and the rest of the diplomatic
mission had been taken into custody by the North Korean invaders. He had
remained a prisoner of the Communists until April 1953, when he had been
taken by train to Moscow and released. On 21 April, the RAF had flown him
to Gatow and, the following day, his ordeal ended when he arrived at
Abingdon. AEter a period of rest, Blake had been trained as a technical
operations officer and assigned to the London end of Operation PRINCE.
Soon after his arrival, the quality of the 'take' began to deteriorate. Eighteen
months later, he married Gillian Allan, the youngest of Colonel Arthur Allan's
two daughters, who both worked as secretaries in Broadway, where their
father had been one of SIS's veteran Russian translators. In April 1955, Blake
began afour-year tour at Peter Lunn s Berlin Station, which ended in April
1959. Since September 1960, he had been studying Arabic at the Middle East
College Eor Arabic Studies, the Foreign Office's language centre located in the
old monastery of Shemlan, outside Beirut.
At the end of March 1961, the Head of Station in Beirut, Nicholas Elliott,
who had recently taken over from Frank Steele, asked Blake to return to
London for consultations regarding a possible promotion. Apparently uncon-
cerned, Blake accepted Elliott's spurious reason for the recall and flew home
on 3 April. He reported to Dick White at Broadway the following morning,
but instead of being offered a new job, he was ushered into a room where
he was challenged with being the KGB spy known as DIAMOND. His
interrogators were Shergold (who was about to take on the handling of
Penkovsky) and Terence Lecky, another counter-intelligence expert who had
joined the Friends in 1946 and had spent four years in Germany, followed by
two in Zurich. During his first session with Shergold and Lecky, Blake gave
reasonable answers to many of .the points raised by his inter ogators, and it
was agreed that the interview would be continued after lunch. Blake promptly
left the building, apparently not suspecting that he was under constant MI5
surveillance. In fact, he had been kept under observation from the moment he
arrived at London airport.
During the lunchtime break he was seen to approach a public telephone
kiosk and his behaviour was that of someone tormented by indecision. He
wallced up to it as though about to make a call, but then seemed to think
better of it. He eventually returned to SIS headquarters to continue answering
Lecky's questions, but in the meantime MI5's watchers had reported Blake's
evident distress. As soon as Blake walked into the room, Lecky demanded to
know who he had considered telephoning. His wife was still in Beirut, and
Blake was caught off-guard. Suddenly he broke down and made a full statement.
Two Special Branch detectives, Louis Gale and Ferguson Smith, were called
in, and the spy repeated his confession while under a formal caution. In it he
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The Blake Catastrophe 137
admitted that, earlier in the day, he had panicked and had seriously considered
contacting the Soviet Embassy in London to demand an emergency escape.
At the last moment he had decided against it, hoping to bluff his way through
the rest of the interview, but he had lost his nerve. His confession was read
out at the Old Bailey on 3 May 1961, in camera, and he was sentenced to a
record term of forty-two years' imprisonment by the Lord Chief Justice. Blake
was completely unprepared for the length of the sentence and promptly
collapsed. He had been led to believe that his co-operation with Shergold and
Lecky had ensured that he would receive some leniency; instead, he had to be
treated in the Wormwood Scrubs' infirmary wing for shock.
Blake's background was a matter of considerable embarrassment to SIS
and the organization made a variety of attempts to conceal his long-term
employment. Indeed, the Prime Minister was even persuaded to state in the
House of Commons on 4 May 1961, somewhat disingenuously, that 'Blake
was never an established member of the Foreign Service'. A D Notice was
also issued to restrict newspaper comment on Blake's trial, but it was ignored
when leaks disclosed that Blake had been a regular SIS officer. While Fleet
Street editors were often prepared to co-operate with the Ministry of Defence
on matters of genuine national security, they were not willing to save the
Friends from embarrassing publicity over what amounted to afirst-rate blunder.
The attempt to gag the press was seen as just that, and proved thoroughly
counter-productive. Nevertheless, SIS continued its efforts to distance itself
from Blake and tried to portray him as having had only a brief, post-war
involvement with the Friends. A former SIS agent named Edward Spiro, who
wrote books under the pseudonym E. H. Cookridge, perpetuated the legend
in his account of Blake's case entitled Shadow of a Spy.
The reality was somewhat different and, because Blake was such a significant
source for the KGB, it is worth tracing his career in some detail. He was born
in Rotterdam on II November I9Z2 to Catherine Beijderwellen and Captain
Albert Behar, an Egyptian Jew who had served with the British army in France
during the First World War. He had been educated at the English School in
Cairo, where he had stayed with his uncle, a rich banker. In 1938, he returned
to Holland and attended high school in Rotterdam. Soon after the Nazi
invasion, he was interned at Schoorl, near Alkmaar, north of Amsterdam, but
late in October he escaped and lived underground with the resistance. His
cover name, Max de Vries, was the one he had adopted upon joining the Orde
Dienst, one of the principal Dutch resistance movements.
In July 1942, Behar contacted an MI9 escape line and made his way to
Spain, where he was interned briefly at both the Modello Prison in Barcelona
and the notorious Miranda de Ebro camp. Upon his release, he reported to
the British Embassy in Madrid, where arrangements were made for him to
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~ 3S The Friends
travel to England via Gibraltar. In London he underwent the routine refugee
screening process at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth and,
after he had been cleared and his British citizenship confirmed, he volunteered
to join the Royal Navy.
In November 1943, Behar changed his name by deed poll to Blake (as his
mother and two younger sisters, Adele and Elizabeth, had done already) and
was accepted to join an induction course at Portsmouth. For a short time he
served on coastal minesweepers and then was recommended for an Officers
Training Course at HMS King Alfred, the shore base at Hove. There he was
commissioned as asub-lieutenant RNVR and opted to join a submariner's
programme at Fort Blockhouse, Portsmouth. This he never completed, because
it was discovered that he suffered from impaired hearing which would be
damaged Further if he worked in a pressurized atmosphere, such as underwater
in a submerged submarine. The Royal Navy had no further use for him, so his
name and impressive language qualifications were passed on routinely to the
Naval Intelligence Division. NID, in tum, gave his details to John Cordeaux,
the DNI's Deputy Director in SIS, and Blake had been duly interviewed at
Broadway by Charles Seymour, then the Head of A2, SIS's Dutch Section
(before the post-waz reorganization).
Seymour was not much older than Blake and had transferred to SIS in 1941,
having originally been recruited into SOE from the Royal Tank Corps. His
father had been the managing director in Holland of British American Tobacco
(BAT), so he had spent most of his school holidays there and spoke fluent
Dutch. After his arrival at Broadway, he had been appointed assistant to Ewen
Rabagliati, then Head of A2. It is a reflection of SIS's pre-war amateur approach
to intelligence that Rabagliati, who was responsible Eor intelligence operations
in Holland and Denmazk, spoke not a word of Dutch or Danish. Rabagliati
eventually clashed with Kenneth Cohen, his colleague in A4, the French
Section, and resigned from SIS when the CSS ruled in Cohen's favour. Thus,
somewhat unexpectedly, Seymour succeeded him and became SIS's youngest
head of a country section.
Another member of A2 was Kenneth Dulling, an army officer on temporary
secondment whose father had worked for Unilever in Holland. Dulling had
suffered a nervous breakdown in the Middle East and had been sent home
where, as a Dutch speaker, he was'considered ideal material for SIS. Seymour s
principal agent-runner was a colourful character known as Duggie Childs. A
former Merchant mariner, he had operated a seaside boat rental business in
Scheveningen and had also supplied the Passport Control Officer in The Hague
with the occasional item of intelligence. When the Nazis invaded, he had tried
to get his family on a ship to England and, in the attempt, had been badly
wounded in an air raid. One of his legs had been amputated and the Germans
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The Blake Catastrophe 139
had repatriated him through the Red Cross. A2 was completed by two junior
officers, Captain Makin and Hang Druce, and two secretaries, Diana Legh and
Iris Peake.
The Misses Legh and Peake came from prominent English families: Diana's
Father was Colonel the Hon. Sir Piers Legh, Master of the King's Household;
and Iris's Father was the Rt Hon. Osbert Peake, Conservative MP for North
Leeds and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office (later
to be ennobled Viscount Ingleby). Her mother was Lady Joan Capell, daughter
of the seventh Earl of Essex. There is a purpose for emphasizing Iris's blue-
blooded background: soon after Blake's arrival in Al, he became hopelessly
infatuated with her.
There has been much speculation about Blake's apparent conversion to the
Soviet cause, and the commonly accepted version is that he succumbed to
some kind of 'brainwashing' technique while a prisoner of the Koreans between
June 1950 and his release in April 1953. However, there are also those who
believe that another, earlier incident played some part in his subsequent
behaviour. One weekend, Blake had been invited to stay with the Peakes at
their country home at Snilesworth, near Northallerton in Yorkshire. After
dinner one evening, Iris's father had taken Blake aside and had made it quite
clear that there was absolutely no question of him even contemplating marriage
to his daughter. Blake had interpreted his remarks as offensively anti-Semitic
and had never got over it. It had never occurred to him that he might have
been regarded as 'unsuitable' by English Society. The Hon. Iris Peake continued
her wartime service in SIS and eventually went on to become alady-in-
waiting to Princess Margaret.
As to the damage sustained by SIS through Blake's switch in loyalties, he '
himself admitted to having passed to the Soviets every conceivable detail of
his work from 1 September 1953, when he resumed his duties at Broadway
after five months' leave. A particularly depressing aspect of the case was that
Blake was judged to have been one of the new breed of professionals. He had
not slipped into the organization under some old pals' act, but had been
selected and promoted on merit and his performance had been excellent. He
was a brilliant linguist with a natural aptitude for intelligence work. Nobody
had detected signs of his disaffection or even his social insecurity. His unpre-
cedented sentence reflected the gravity of his offence. As he subsequently
confirmed to Lecky during a series of debriefing sessions conducted at Worm-
wood Scrubs after his appeal had been rejected, he had effectively nullified all
the German stations' anti-Soviet activities throughout his four years in Berlin.
Geoffrey McDermott, formerly SIS's Foreign Office Adviser and the British
Minister in Berlin at the time of Blake's arrest, made this observation about
the scale of his betrayal:
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140 The Friends
Looking back with hindsight it is now clear that our intelligence was not
too good. British intelligence which a few years back had greatly flourished
in Berlin had taken a hard knock as a result of the activities there of George
Blake, the double agent, which had only recently been exposed. No doubt
our Allies' intelligence was affected to some extent too by his skilled
treachery.2
In reality, Blake had compromised everything he could get his hands on in
Berlin, regardless of whether the source was from SIS or the CIA. He certainly
blew Operation PRINCE at a very early stage, but the KGB appear to have
allowed the project to continue for fear of jeopardizing him. It is also the belief
of William Hood, the CIA case officer who ran his organization's lone mole
in the GRU, Piotr Popov, that his case had been betrayed by Blake. Popov
had been arrested in Moscow in October 1959 and executed. A post mo~tem
of the affair showed that inadvertently Blake had been given two opportunities
to wam the KGB of the penetration. Once, in an unguarded moment, David
Murphy, then in charge of the CIA's local anti-Soviet operations, had men-
tioned the existence of 'a hot one' while visiting SIS's Berlin Station. On
another occasion, Popov had tried to renew contact with the CIA by slipping
a message to a British military observer in East Germany. His note had been
passed on to the CIA via the office in the Olympic Stadium buildings, just
when Blake was routinely rifling through the desks of his colleagues during
their lunch-hours.
Blake described his lengthy career as a KGB agent in detail to Lecky and,
despite the severity of his sentence, proved an exceptionally useful source. As
well as identifying the Soviet intelligence officers who had handled him in
London while under diplomatic cover, such as Sergei Kondrashev, Blake also
confirmed the kind of information he had supplied. By going back over the
material, the Friends were able to assess the scale of Blake's betrayal. The final
damage report made shattering reading. Not only had Blake compromised
documents and agents, but he had also given the KGB a comprehensive order
of battle for the Friends, identifying every currently serving officer and
reconstructing the personnel of every SIS station in the world. In short, Blake
had blown the Friends sky-high. The implications were appalling, not least for
the Penkovsky case, because Blake admitted having identified Ruari Chisholm
back in 1960. This was further evidence to undermine what had been hailed
as SIS's greatest post-war coup, for it had to be assumed that the KGB must
have concentrated its considerable resources on Chisholm almost as soon as
he arrived in the Soviet capital. IE indeed that had happened, how had
Penkovsky kept his liberty for so long and how had Janet Chisholm been able
to hold so many meetings with himZ As the awful consequences of Blake's
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penetration was even worse than they had feared.
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TWELVE
The Molehunt Era
The resultant contest between Soviet intelligence and British counter-
intelligence resembles - at least until the late 1950s - a football match between
Manchester United and the Corinthian Casuals in the years of the decline of
amateurism.'
Robert Cecil, The Missing Dimension'
The identification and elimination of George Blake as a Soviet mole was not
to be the end of SIS's anxiety about Soviet penetration. In fact, it was to
herald the start of what might be termed the molehunt era.
In April 1961, Blake's was the only proven incidence of treachery within
the organization although, of course, Philby's case was still unresolved. And
far from having been abandoned after the 'third man' debate in the House of
Commons in 1955, Philby had actually been taken back on to SIS's books,
albeit unofficially, at the Beirut Station where his old friend Peter Lunn had
taken over from Nicholas Elliott as Head of Station in 1962. Apart from
peddling the occasional titbit of information and mining the odd informant,
Philby's overt occupation was that of a 'stringer for the Observer and the
EconomisE, cabling routine despatches on political developments in the Middle
East back to London. His renewed connection with his old ofpice is supposed
to have shocked Dick White, who had apparently assumed that the sacking
of his old adversary had been the final chapter in his duplicitous career.
Whether true or not, the embargo on contacts with Philby was certainly
breached by several officers who had not been indoctrinated into the details
of the case against him. In any event, following his public exposure and
clearance in 1955, Philby had eked out a living as a journalist and, for a short
time, had been employed in Ireland to 'ghost' the history of a family firm
owned by his friend David Allen.
The event which dramatically changed Philby's cosy relationship with the
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The Molehunt Era 143
Friends was the defection, in December 1961, of a KGB major named Anatoli
Golitsyn in Helsinki. Golitsyn had been planning his escape, together with
his wife and daughter, for months and arrived well prepared with his 'meal-
ticket': enough information about the KGB's moles in the West to identify
dozens of them. In particular, Golitsyn confirmed that Philby had been a long-
term Soviet agent and was still operating as a spy.
Golitsyn's revelation was a useful piece in the jigsaw of evidence that had
been accumulated since the original investigation back in 1951, but in legal
terms it was merely hearsay and far from conclusive. The clincher was to come
later in the year when White was approached by an old wartime M I S colleague,
Lord Rothschild. It was his introduction of Flora Solomon that was to provide
the key to extracting a confession from Philby.
Flora Solomon was a senior executive of Marks and Spencer and had known
Philby before the war. She had also employed his second wife, Aileen, and
had attended their wedding in 1946. According to Mrs Solomon, Philby had
not only hinted at his secret work Eor the Soviets before the war, but had
actually attempted to recruit her by inviting her to join him in his 'important
work for peace'. Why had Mrs Solomon waited so long before denouncing
Philby? On her own admission she had delayed more than twenty years before
approaching the authorities. She gave various explanations, but the most
convincing was her admitted anger and frustration caused by the anti-Zionist
tone of his newspaper articles. Rothschild had reported her remarks to White,
who, in tum, arranged for the Security Service to interview her. Although her
statement was less than comprehensive, MI5 was convinced that, combined
with Golitsyn's testimony, it might be enough for a skilled interrogator to
confront Philby. The only remaining difficulty was the problem posed by
Blake s recent conviction. The savage sentence of forty-two years' impris-
onment was a powerful disincentive for Philby to co-operate, and he was a
suffiaently wise counter-intelligence operative to know the practical limits of
MI5's jurisdiction. There seemed little chance of persuading him to return to
London to face further questioning, and there was even less likelihood of him
falling for a pretext like the one used to tempt Blake back to London. After
all, Philby was no longer an SIS officer and could not simply be recalled to
headquarters. Indeed, assuming that he had been alerted to Golitsyn's defection,
he would be anticipating just such a move against him.
Even in the unlikely event that he volunteered a confession to MI5, there
was no guarantee that he would agree to face the music in England. Why
should hel His offences against the Official Secrets Act were not extraditable
from a foreign country and, provided he avoided British territory,. he could
escape arrest for the remainder of his life. The nature of the evidence against
him would also look decidedly weak in a court of law, as it rested upon the
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144 The Friends
unsubstantiated allegations of a Soviet defector (assuming, of course, that
Golitsyn could be persuaded to go into the witness-box) and the denunciation
of an old friend who might easily lose her nerve. All in all, it was far Erom
promising.
Given these unpalatable facts, White conferred with his former deputy, Sir
Roger Hollis, now Director-General of the Security Service, and came up with
an ingenious solution. On the basis that there was only an intelligence
advantage to be gained from Philby's confession and that any thought of a
public prosecution was likely to be futile, there was still the option of an
official immunity from prosecution sanctioned by the Attorney-General.
Turning Queen's evidence is an established method of obtaining useful
information from individuals who would otherwise not be expected to co-
operate. In Philby's case the proposal put to the Attorney-General, then Sir
John Hobson, was even more straightforward. The only hope of obtaining his
co-operation, a prize highly valued by both MI5 and SIS, was the offer of a
fomtal immunity from prosecution. The Attorney-General gave his consent
to the plan, leaving White and Hollis to an ange its delivery.
Initially, it had been MI5's intention to send a D Branch case officer to
Lebanon to make the offer to Philby, but at the last minute White took matters
into his own hands and decided that, as the affair was strictly an internal one
for the Friends, Nicholas Elliott should Ely to Beirut and put the proposition
to his old friend. Despite resistance from the counter-espionage staff who had
been briefed to undertake this assignment, Hollis concurred with White's
decision. Accordingly, Elliott arrived in Beirut early in the New Year of 1963,
briefed his successor at the Station and rented an apartment, which was then
wired for sound.
The exact circumstances of the meeting between Elliott and Philby have
never been disclosed. Elliott's own version of it has yet to be published, but
two things are known: Philby expressed no surprise at the offer of immunity
and accepted it without a moment's hesitation. Furthermore, he typed up a
two-page summary of his confession and handed it to Elliott before he flew
back to London, to report his mission accomplished to White.
Any jubilation at Elliott's apparent success was short-lived, because Philby
disappeared from Beirut on 23 January. It was only then that SIS and MI5
took a closer look at Philby's 'confession and realised that an off-hand remark
made to Elliott about having expected him sooner might have had an added
significance. Perhaps Philby had been warned of F1liott's imminent arrival, and
the two-page document he had drawn up was not as spontaneous as it
purported to be.
The confession acknowledged Philby's dual role since his recruitment to the
Soviet cause in 1934 and disclosed his part in the abortive Volkov defection
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in 1945. On the sensitive matter of the identity of other moles, Philby cleared
his old university friend Anthony Blunt of ever having been involved in Soviet
espionage, but confirmed that Tim Milne, who had been his protege in the
Friends, had been a fellow conspirator.
Philby's allegation against his lifelong friend was eventually proved to be
baseless, but only after Milne had been suspended from duty, interrogated
and forced to resign. It was a devastating experience for him and an indication
of just how low Philby had sunk. Milne's record in the Friends was faultless
and his one overseas posting, to Edward de Haan's Station in Beme for two
years from 1956, had been a success. Yet he was dispensed with, chiefly to
eliminate a risk perceived by the Americans. He was later found a job as a
clerk in the House of Commons, a post he kept until 1976.
Philby's disappearance prevented him from being taken to task about the
veracity of his confession and left SIS in a state of turmoil. Was any of his
statement true? Did his remarks about Blunt's loyalty make him more or less
likely to have been an accomplice? Had he really been expecting Elliott to tum
up, or had his initial reaction been a revealing slip? There was little way to
judge these matters on the basis of the tape-recording made by Elliott, because
the window had been left open in the apartment in Beirut throughout the
confrontation and the noise of the traffic had drowned the conversation.
Nevertheless, it did seem odd that Philby should have been so willing to admit
his treachery when, on previous occasions, he had defended himself with
vigour. What had made him concede defeat so easily? Was his subsequent
disappearance a further clue to swell-planned operation? The evidence seemed
to point that way when the Lebanese security authorities reported that, shortly
before Elliott had arrived in Beirut, a Soviet diplomat named Yuri Modin had
paid a fleeting visit to Lebanon. Modin had already served in London twice -
Erom 1950 to 1953 as Second (then First) Secretary, and from 1957 to 1959
as Press Attache -and had been flagged by MI5 as being a senior KGB
officer. Was his unexplained appearance in Beirut at such a critical moment a
coincidence, or an indication that he had delivered a vital message to his star
agent, perhaps alerting him to the build-up of evidence against him in England?
If the two did hold a rendervous, it was unlikely to have been a routine affair,
but rather a lengthy meeting at which the experienced case officer had given
Philby an up-to-date assessment of recent developments, altogether too secret
and complicated to be entrusted to an enciphered radio signal.
Whatever the truth of the situation, there was no mistaking Philby's absence.
Yet another damage assessment was prepared on the basis that he had been
a Soviet spy continuously since 1934 and, like Blake, had betrayed everything
that had passed his way. Once again, like Blake, it did nothing to enhance
SIS's special relationship with the CIA.
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146 The Friends
It could be argued that Philby's most effective periods as a Soviet mole
were during the time he headed R5, shortly before his departure to Turkey,
and throughout the eighteen months he served in Washington, where he was
in a powerful position to influence SIS polity and obtain almost unrestricted
access to many of the CIA's operations. Although he may have been useful
during the war, his knowledge was necessarily limited, in the latter part at
least, to matters directly affecting the Iberian Peninsula. Of course he must
have compromised many of his colleagues in Section V who remained in the
service after the war, but the damage sustained by the Friends must have been
less than devastating. Similarly, there is some evidence to show that the
Volkov episode in 1945 was an experience he had no wish to repeat. Volkov's
mysterious removal before Philby could negotiate his defection had all the
hallmarks of a betrayal, and Philby must have known that any similar incidents
on his file would be bound to attract unwelcome attention. Accordingly, he
had exercised great caution when passing current, operational matters to the
KGB. This circumspection can be seen in his handling of another defector,
Ismail Akhmedov, in 1948.
Akhmedov had been a GRU lieutenant-colonel, who had been working
under press attache cover at the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul during the war.
Calling himself Grigori Nikolayev, Akhmedov had fallen foul of the NKVD
and, in May 1942, had decided to defect. He had made contact with the
brother of a local station officer, Jack Whittall, who had been running the
family's merchant business? in Turkey, and a message had been passed on to
the SIS Head of Station, Harold Gibson. However, when the moment came
for Akhmedov to defect, he chose to throw himself upon the mercy of the
Turkish Security Inspectorate. This proved to be a wise move, because it
subjected him to only the most superficial of debriefings and then set him up
with a permanent bodyguard and a new identity.
It was not until 1948, when Philby had already been established in Istanbul
for eighteen months, that Akhmedov became restless and asked the Security
Inspectorate to put him in touch with either the British or the Americans in
the hope of obtaining a residency permit elsewhere. The price, of course, was
a thorough debriefing, which was undertaken by Philby at an SIS safe-house,
a eomfortable, fifth-floor apartment in Jihangir, overlooking the Bosphorus.
Akhmedov later recalled his inhoduction to Philby, 'the Head of the British
Secret Service in Turkey, the son of the famous St John Philby':
Philby was all smiles and courtesy: the impeccable English gentleman full
of attention. For starters we had a drink and then got down to business,
business which was going to last approximately four weeks -each day
from nine to five, with short interruptions for lunch, which was served in
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the same room. Oh, my God. If only I had known that this smiling
courteous Englishman named Philby was the man who had tipped the
KGB about Soviet Vice-Consul Konstantin and had sent him to certain
death! If only I had known that here in this most luxurious apartment I
was actually sitting in a KGB den and was being interviewed by a KGB
agent!Z
Philby was thoroughly professional in his approach to Akhmedov, and the
defector had no reason to suspect his interrogator:
While neglecting my background, Philby showed an intense interest in my
reasons for defecting, in the. circumstances sun-ounding it, in how I was
handled by the Turks, and finally in the attempts, if any, of the KGB to
whisk me out of Turkey or to liquidate me. He was obsessed with Teaming
the smallest details of the Turkish handling of my protection....
He was extremely interested to find out how much I knew about Soviet
espionage activities in England. Here he tried his best to grill me. Of course,
I did my best to tell him everything I knew of all those matters, because
I wanted to expose the scale of Soviet world-wide espionage activities
conducted through all channels. Also, I was hoping, as a result of our long
association during these meetings, that he might help me settle in England'
Akhmedov s interviews with Philby were recorded by his secretary in short-
hand and backed-up by a hidden tape-recorder, so there was little opportunity
for Philby to conceal his testimony, but almost everything he said was more
than six years out of date. Akhmedov was passed over to the Americans and
eventually in 1953, he obtained asylum in the United States.
As the holder of a senior rank in the GRU, Akhmedov must have been high
on the Soviet's assassination list and, no doubt, Philby reported his meetings
with him, but there was no repetition of the Volkov episode which had proved
so difficult to explain to the molehunters in 1951, and again in 1955. Philby's
final escape prompted White to ocder a massive purge of the Friends, in parallel
to a similar exercise then being conducted inside the Security Service. MI5's
enquiries were to lead, in April 1964, to Blunt who, like Philby before him,
agreed to confess his espionage in return for an immunity from prosecution.
Unfortunately, from SIS's viewpoint, he professed ignorance of any Soviet
spies at work in SIS, apart from John Caimcross, who had worked briefly in
Section V at the end of the war.
SIS's counter-intelligence branch had several good reasons to believe that
the organization had been penetrated even further. Firstly, there was the
obvious possibility that Blake and Philby might have either recruited one or
two of their colleagues, or had recommended them to their KGB controllers,
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~ 48 The Friends
leaving the Russians to make the approach. Certainly, both men had had plenty
of time to sound out like-minded colleagues and, given the nature of the work
the Friends undertook, must have noticed opportunities to entrap vulnerable
personnel. Talent-spotting of this type would have been a matter of routine,
and it seemed improbable that no one had succumbed to temptation or
blackmail. There was also the chance that they had deliberately acquired
tainted sources, which were still supplying material of a dubious value. Then
there were the accusations made by previous defectors, all of which had to be
re-examined in the light of the exposure of Philby and Blake. And, finally,
there were some unexplained incidents, like the suicide of Harold Gibson at
his apartment in Rome in August 1960, which could be seen as having some
connection with MI5's molehunt.
There were other, vaguer indications which might be interpreted as evidence
of Soviet penetration: the inability to recruit worthwhile Soviet moles; the
paucity of authentic defectors; the lack of any major breakthrougk in spite of
the numerous double-agent operations mounted against Moscow; the odd
circumstances of the Petrov defection in Australia which so nearly ended in
catastrophe (see page 154); the almost uncanny ability of the KGB to deter
would-be defectors; the failure of so many technical surveillance operations
around the world; the absence of a conclusive counter-espionage case in either
GCHQ or MI5, two of the KGB's most obvious targets; the high proportion
of SIS personnel with Russian or foreign backgrounds; and the apparent
ease with which Caimcross, Blake and Philby had been able to get themselves
into positions where they could inflict the greatest damage. And so the list went
on. While none of these items in isolation added up to anything other than the
flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, when reviewed in toEo the situation
looked depressingly clear. The only antidote was a further dose of hunting
through the files for the tell-tale clues to disloyalty that, in retrospect, were so
obvious in the major investigations experienced to date.
The most immediate cases to be reinvestigated were those individuals
named by Vollcov as having been Soviet assets. He had identified Robert
Zaehner as a Soviet source, an allegation later repeated by an MI5 informant
of doubtful reliability, Goronwy Rees. At the time of Rees s denunciation,
Zaehner had bean working for Norman Derbyshire and Monty Woodhouse
at the Tehran Station. He had returned to academic life at Oxford shortly
before the culmination of Operation BOOT and, therefore, did not pose a
threat. Nevertheless, he was interviewed again and made aware of the inves-
tigation into his background.
Another on the list of Foreign Office staff fingered by defectors was Sir
Anthony Rumbold. Although a regular diplomat, he had originally been named
as long ago as 1936 by a GRU defector. When the files were reopened, it
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The Molehunt Era ~qg
was realized that Rumbold had enjoyed alife-long friendship with Donald
Maclean, who had been best man at Rumbold's first marriage. There was no
new evidence against Rumbold, so the case was passed to MI5 and shelved.
More significance was attached to the case developed against Sir George
Glutton, the senior diplomat who had been appointed as SIS's Foreign Office
Adviser in 1952 and had played a major role in Operation BOOT. In 1955,
he had been succeeded by Michael Williams and had gone to Manila as British
Ambassador. Thereafter, he served in the same capacity in Warsaw, where his
homosexuality may have made him susceptible to blackmail. In any event, he
too came under intensive investigation when a junior, local employee based
at the British Embassy in Vienna, and already suspected of peddling low-grade
information around town, was put under close surveillance. One weekend he
was followed to London where, to the astonishment of the watchers, he visited
Glutton at his flat in St James's. A pretext was found to sack the man from
the Embassy, and the case against Glutton lapsed when he died soon afterwards.
None of these enquiries really fulfilled the profile of the Soviet spy in SIS
as described by Anatoli Golitsyn, who had always insisted that the Friends
harboured KGB moles. But when his allegations had been looked at by
Geoffrey Hinton, who had been appointed Head of Counter-intelligence in
1960 upon his return from the Bangkok Station, they had been considered too
vague to pursue. Hinton had been unable to make any headway with Golitsyn's
claims.
According to Golitsyn, whose information had proved so valuable on other
matters and had helped expose Philby and Blunt, the KGB had been running
several agents in London, and both MI5 and SIS had been penetrated. Very
little progress had been made by the Friends on this issue because it was
widely believed that the most likely candidate had been Blake, who had already
been dealt with. However, when Hinton was posted to ,the Paris Station in
1966, his place was taken by Christopher Phillpotts, who had just completed
two years in Washington and was determined to carry on the molehunt where
Hinton had left off.
Phillpotts was hugely popular within the intelligence community, amuch-
respected, larger-than-life figure who had originally come into contact with
the Friends by complaining about their illicit cross-Channel activities during
the war. The son of an admiral, Phillpotts had been a regular naval officer
before the war and, in 1940, had found himself in charge of inshore patrols
around the Devonshire coast. He had been in constant conflict with Frank
Slocum's private navy, then based in the Helford estuary, which he had
regarded as a nuisance and a waste of time. For his trouble he had been given
a nominal posting to Naval Intelligence and placed in charge of the entire
operation. He had also covered himself in glory as Head of Station in Athens
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150 The Friends
and had been decorated with the CMG in 1957 for sabotaging the efforts of
enosis gun-runners, who had unwisely attempted to smuggle weapons to
Cyprus in the Emergency. In i966, Phillpotts was fifty-one and was due to
retire in Eour years' time. There had been a chance, just before his departure
to Washington in 1964, that he might have been promoted to be White's
Vice-Chief, but Maurice Oldfield had got the job instead, by recommending
himself, according to rumour. Phillpotts, therefore, had no ambition to succeed
White, for the post was effectively promised to Oldfield, so he moved into
his new offices in SIS's recently acquired anonymous tower block at 100
Westminster Bridge Road, unimaginatively called Century House, and renewed
the molehunt by going back to the allegations made against Rumbold, the
very earliest claims of Soviet penetration dating from 1936.
When non together, the claims made by a series of separate defectors over
a long period of years followed a similar pattern. Walter Krivitsky, the GRU
agent-runner who had been one of the first to defect rather than face a purge
in Moscow in the 1930s, had described how one of his best sources in Paris
had been closely involved with a British intelligence officer who had sold
information about SIS. Krivitsky had been found shot dead in his Washington
hotel room in February I94I, so he could give no further help, but another
defector, Igor Gouzenko, had talked in 1945 of a spy nur by the GRU in
'British Counter-intelligence', with the cryptonym ELLI. Gouzenko had only
been aloes-level cipher clerk so his further usefulness as a witness was limited.
Nevertheless, he was interviewed in Canada, where he reiterated his belief in
a traitor codenamed ELLI. Volkov had also mentioned a total of five Soviet
agents in British intelligence and two in the Foreign Office. Skripkin had
disappeared before he could elaborate on what he knew and his colleague,
Yuri Rastvorov, later confirmed that he had been betrayed by someone inside
the Friends. Michal Goleruewski, the Polish defector from the UB, had said
much the same and had talked of a'middle-ranking' agent in SIS. There seemed
to be a consistency in these claims, from people who had akeady established
their credentials as reliable sources, which pointed to further Soviet penetration
above and beyond Phitby and Blake.
The first two victims of the molehunt organized by Phillpotts were almost
certainly innocent of any contact with the KGB. Andn:w King's offence was
to have owned up to his pre-war member,hip of the CPGB when a student
at Magdalene, Cambridge. He had told Kenneth Cohen of this indiscretion
when he had first been approached to join SIS, and had brought the matter
up again in 1951 when he had been serving as Head of Station in Vienna. On
that occasion Menzies had said that there was already enough trouble with
MI5 and had advised him to keep quiet. When subjected to a hostile interrog-
ation by the Security Service in 1967, King agreed that he had always known
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The Molehunt Era 151
about Philby's membership of the CPGB. Unfortunately, Cohen had been
unable to remember King's original declaration about his Communist past and
had been unwilling to corroborate King's version of events. When pressed,
King admitted that in some ways it was surprising that Philby had not passed
his name on to the KGB for possible recruitment, but he insisted that the
Soviets had never even come close to making an approach. This was accepted,
and King retired.
He was followed into premature retirement by Donald Prater, who was
recalled from the Stockholm Station, which he had run since 1965, to face
questions about his pre-war connections with the CPGB. Born in Australia,
Prater had attended the Ealing County School before going up to Corpus
Christi, Oxford. After war service in the Royal Fusiliers, he had joined the
Friends in May 1946 and completed atwo-year tour in Singapore before
going to Dusseldorf under BCCG cover in August 1949. Thereafter, he had
served at the Beirut Station with Frank Steele from February 1955 to October
1957 and had then moved to Vienna as Cyril Rolo's deputy, until his return
to Broadway in November 1959. Prater's whole career had been in the Friends,
yet he too opted to resign soon after his fiftieth birthday. He moved to New
Zealand to take up a university post lecturing in German.4
Neither King nor Prater were spies, but under the tough regime imposed
by Phillpotts their political past had wrecked their careers. Some even believed
that mere association with a suspect who had been put through the wringer
was enough to blight a promising future; Nicholas Elliott, the man who had
extracted Philby's confession, opted to find a new job in the City of London.
The atmosphere of the molehunt inevitably brought morale to a low ebb,
and some of the cases pursued by searches through ancient files were impossible
to conclude, causing further uncertainty. Much time was devoted to following
up Golitsyn's belief that the elusive master spy in British intelligence had
something Russian in his background. This vague clue fitted any number of
the old-timers who, like the Gibson brothers, had been born in prerevolution-
ary Russia and had spent a lifetime fighting Bolshevism. Roman Sulakov, Biffy
Dunderdale, Major Steveni and the Gibsons had all worked for SIS and had
immersed themselves in anti-Communist, White Russian circles in order to
cultivate sources. It was also true that the KGB had proved itself to be a past
master at fronting bogus resistance movements so as to manipulate and even
control the opposition. All the SIS White Russians, for different reasons, must
have been targeted by the KG B at some time. Sulakov had worked closely with
Philby at the Istanbul Station; Dunderdale had managed Tokaev s defection in
1948; Steveni had received Boris Bajanov, Stalin's personal assistant back in
1928; the Gibson brothers had worked for SIS throughout Eastern Europe and
the Middle East.
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Harold Gibson's suicide had been a particularly puzzling affair. The :.:..t
three years of his extraordinary career had been spent as Head of Statio~~ ;;i
Rome, where he retired in 1958 and been succeeded by Craig Smellie. Ar;?cr
his first wife, Juliet Kalmanoviecz, died in 1947, he married another Russis.~1-
Ekaterina Alfimov. For reasons that were never fully explained, he apparer: ;~-
shot himself in his apartment in Rome on 24 August 1960.
The emergence of the Counter-Intelligence Branch as a powerful, sometir,~;
feared, instrument to investigate Soviet penetration was in part a reflect:"t~
and consequence of the dedication of Phillpotts's staff. Two officers in partic~::.ar
proved to have an exceptional talent for trawling through the old files :-,,
construct new dossiers: Arthur Martin and Theo PantchefE.
Martin had been swopped from the counter-espionage, D Branch, of :',~
Security Service, with Terence Lecky, in November 1964 following a series .,f
internal rows among MI5's molehunters. It was a convenient move, for Le:~~?
was still handling Blake, then serving his sentence at Wormwood Scrubs, a:,,1
Martin, the acknowledged expert on Philby, had been placed in charge .,f
SIS's long-neglected Registry. There he had unrestricted access to the old ca.~?
histories and a free hand to reopen old enquiries. Pantcheff, who had operatr,{
under BCCG cover in Munich in the early 1950s, was assigned to investigate
the allegations made by Krivitsky. With White's approval, the occasionall~?
strained relationship between the two organizations had been patched i,F,
because of their combined commitment to root out the moles. Stephen ,lc
Mowbray, for example, who had returned from the Montevideo Station its
1961, had been seconded to the Security Service to assist in the pursuit of a
highly placed suspect and continued to have regular meetings with his oppoa-t c
numbers from Curzon Street until his posting to Washington as Phillpott.'s
successor in 1966. A specialist working party, codenamed FLUENCY, ~,~a~
set up to direct the activities of the molehunters from both services. Staffr,{
by experienced counter-intelligence officers, the FLUENCY Committee ~~?as
to supervise a series of investigations and recommend phillpotts to dispeii.c
with several career officers who, for one reason or another, had come un~{rr
its scrutiny.
One of the most controversial cases dealt with by FLUENCY was that ,.f
Dick Ellis, the Australian-born former Conholler Far East who had taken early
retirement in 1953 to go back to Sydney. There he had worked briefly uri~{rr
contract for the fledgling Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), bef?rc
fuming up again in London. At the time of the investigation into his payl,
codenamed EMERTON, he had been re-employed on a temporary basis in
the Registry at Century House, 'weeding' redundant files from the records.
Like so many of the investigations inspired by FLUENCY, the basis of tl~~
case against Ellis began as a series of coincidences, evidence of the m~~~t
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circumstantial kind which, when linked together, cried out for closer exam-
ination. His career in SIS had stretched back to 1924, when he had been sent
to the Berlin Station, fresh from the Sorbonne, under consular cover. A talented
linguist, with family connections through his first wife, Lilia Zelensky, to the
exiled White Russian community on the Continent, Ellis used the cover-name
Howard to run agents, one of whom was his brother-in-law, Alexander
Zelensky.
Shortly before the war, Ellis had been brought back to London and had
been given the task, along with a team of other personnel fluent in German, to
translate and transcribe recordings made of telephone coversations intercepted
from the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace. This highly secret
monitoring operation, conducted with the clandestine help of the Post Office,
had continued almost to the outbreak of war, but appeared to lose its value
as a source of high-grade intelligence at a particular moment when new security
procedures had been introduced on the Embassy's supposedly secure direct
line to Berlin. Ellis had remained at Broadway until June 1940, when he had
been posted to SIS's New York Station, then located in the Cunard building
on Wall Street, as deputy to the newly appointed British Passport Control
Officer, William Stephenson, whose station was later retitled the BSC. Towards
the end of 1944, Ellis had returned to Broadway, before being posted to
Singapore. At the conclusion of his tour in the Far East Menzies had appointed
him Chief of Production in Europe, in succession to Frederick Vanden Heuvel,
and this was the post he had passed on to Herbert Setchell in 1953 upon his
short-lived, premature retirement to Australia, which was alleged to have been
recommended by his doctors on medical grounds. Those who knew him had
been puzzled by his decision to return to Australia and had not been convinced
by his excuse of ill-health. In fact, he was to live for another two decades and
remarry twice. .
In many ways Ellis's career resembled one long adventure. After a short
spell at Melbourne University, where his studies were interrupted by the
outbreak of war in 1914, he had joined up as a private soldier in the Royal
Fusiliers. He was later commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment and had
spent two years at the front in France. This had been followed by postings to
Egypt and India, and then his attachment to General Malleson's military
mission in Tashkent. In 1963, Ellis wrote an account of his part in the Allied
intervention on the side of the White Russians, entitled The Transcaspian
Episode. When he eventually returned to civilian life in 1920, he began a course
at St Edmund's Hall, Oxford, but then moved to Paris without completing it.
There he studied languages at the Sorbonne and started to contribute article
to the London Morning Post and other newspapers on a freelance basis. Thanks
to an introduction to Major Langton, then the SIS Head of Station in Paris,
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154 The Friends
Ellis had also begun an undercover life as a British agent. His marriage to Lilia
had not lasted long and he had married again in 1934, to Barbara Burgess-
Smith, whom he divorced in 1947. Oddly, Ellis later made a clumsy attempt
to conceal his marriage to Lilia by omitting it entirely from reference books
like Who's Who; instead, he listed Barbara as his first wife.
By sifting through the files, the molehunters managed to construct an
interesting parallel of coincidences which neatly fitted Ellis's career: an Abwehr
officer undergoing a debriefing session immediately after the war had identified
Alexander Zelensky as the source of some extremely accurate intelligence
about SIS's pre-war internal stnacture; there was an old file which raised the
possibility of a leak having been responsible for the unexpected imposition of
security measures on Ribbentrop's telephone line at the German Embassy;
according to Soviet wireless decrypts and information from the Americans,
BSC had accommodated several Soviet sympathizers during the war years;
and one of the RS dossiers detailing allegations against a certain 'Captain Ellis'
had been dismissed and shelved, on Philby's authority.
According to testimony from Blunt, who had been co-operating with MI5
since April 1964, there might have been a direct link between Ellis and Philby.
Blunt recalled having been alerted by Philby, shortly before the defection from
Canberra of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in April 1953, that just such an
event was about to take place and that he should take extreme caution for a
while. Blunt had heeded the warning, and the Petrovs, who both held senior
ranks in the KGB, had indeed volunteered some useful information about
Soviet espionage in Britain to the Security Service, which, at the time, had
only seemed of passing relevance to Burgess and Maclean. But how had Philby
been tipped off to the impending defection and why had the Soviets failed to
prevent what must have been a catastrophe for them? It fumed out that the
Russians had made an abortive attempt to stop Petrov from.defecting, but the
two thugs assigned the task had arrived too late. Instead, they had had to
settle for Mrs Petrov, whom they tried to manhandle on to a plane. She had
been rescued by the Australian authorities, but only after the aircraft had
broken its journey to refuel.
The molehunters speculated about Ellis's role in the Petrov affair and
concluded that he had been handily placed in ASIS to learn in advance of
Petrov's cultivation and his decision to defect. While it was certain that Ellis
had returned to London early, in breach of his employment contract with
ASIS, and had then arranged to meet Philby for lunch, there was no proof
that he had been the source of the tip-off which Philby had swiftly relayed to
Blunt.
The substance of the case against Ellis fell into two categories: illicit pre-
waz connections with the Abwehr and post-war contact with the KGB. When
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invited to explain the coincidences, Ellis vigorously protested his innocence
of both charges and indignantly showed his anti-communist credentials, inclu-
ding the fact that he was at that time working on an anti-Soviet book entitled
The Expansion of Rassia. Painstaking cross-examination of Ellis by Pantcheff
and Phillpotts revealed a few flaws in his denials, and gradually Ellis's defensive
facade began to crumble. At one moment he had insisted on not having taken
part in the telephone?tapping operation on the Ribbentrop tine, but had then
been Forced to agree that, in fact, he had after all. As a new interrogation
session at Century House was about to begin, and apparently convinced that
a former Abwehr officer had consented to Ely to Condon to describe his
relationship with him before the war, Ellis suddenly produced a short, typed
statement which he had prepared overnight. Somewhat reminiscent of Philby's
confession, the Ellis document contained the admission that he had, indeed,
been forced through circumstances to supply the Germans with information
about SIS's internal structure and some of its personnel before the war. The
conduit used had been his former brother-in-law in Paris. As regards any post-
war contacts with the KGB, Ellis continued his vehement denials and could not
be persuaded to budge, even with the offer of an immunity from prosecution.
Had the molehunters stumbled on to an as yet undetected Soviet master-
spy willing to make small concessions in order to avoid revealing the scale of
his duplicity, or was Ellis really what he claimed to be, a pathetic victim of
SIS's parsimony which had Forced him to trade a few worthless secrets to the
Abwehr so as to survive? Opinion was divided. Phillpotts was satisfied that
Ellis had made a clean breast of his treachery, but some MI5 officers, principally
Peter Wright, remained convinced that Ellis had been let off the hook too
.easily. They argued that if the Soviets knew that Ellis had dealt with the
Abwehr, as seemed likely from their penetration of Russian emigre circles in
Paris, they would never have missed the chance to exploit the situation and
apply pressure on him. Whatever the truth, Ellis was allowed to go back
into retirement to Eastbourne, where he died in July 1975. Soon after his
confrontation with the molehunters, Ellis, who was to write two further books,
SovieF Imperialism and Mission Accomplished, pleaded financial hardship to the
CIA and, in recognition of his war service, which had already been rewarded
with the American Legion of Merit, was granted a small pension. At least one
CIA officer regarded Ellis's behaviour as little short of blackmail.
This unsatisfactory conclusion to the Ellis affair was not to mark the end of
the molehunt era, although the investigations sponsored by the FLUENCY
Committee gradually were wound down. On Z2 October 1966, much to the
embarrassment of both the Friends and the Security Service, George Blake
successfully escaped from Wormwood Scrubs and made his way, undetected,
to East Berlin and then to Moscow. The Friends were convinced that the entire
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156 The Friends
episode had been carefully stage-managed by the KGB, but MI5 insisted that
the known KGB and GRU intelligence officers at the Soviet Embassy in
Kensington Palace Gardens appeared to have been equally surprised by Blake's
dramatic escape, over the prison's perimeter wall with the aid of an improvised
rope-ladder fashioned from knitting needles. A massive police search had
ensued, but, although Blake's getaway car had been found abandoned after an
anonymous tip-off, and the owner traced to an Irishman who had been
discharged from the prison the previous June, very little trace of Blake was
found. A wan:ant was issued Eor the arrest of Sean Bourke, who was known
to have been friendly with Blake while in prison with him, but he proved
every bit as elusive as the convicted Soviet spy.
The first definite news of how the escape had been accomplished came from
SIS's Head of Station in Moscow, when, in September the following year,
Bourke unexpectedly called at the British Embassy and requested travel docu-
ments to the West. He claimed to have arrived in the Soviet Union on a forged
British passport and to have been sharing a flat in Moscow with Blake.
However, as an Irish citizen, the Embassy officials could not issue him with a
passport and he was advised to return in a week, so that the authorities in
Dublin could be contacted. In fact, he never went back to the Embassy. In
1968, his brother flew out with a travel document good for a trip back to
Dublin, where Bourke was an ested by the Garda on an extradition wan: ant
alleging that he had conspired to help Blake escape from prison in London.
The application was refused by the High Court, which judged Bourke's offence
to have been political, and he was released. He subsequently wrote his own
candid account of these events, The Springing of George Blake, in which he
stated that the KGB had played no part in Blake's escape, and that most of
the financial and other assistance given had been provided by two leading
members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, whom he discreetly
refeaed to only as 'Michael Reynolds' and 'Pat Porter . Their true names,
Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, were not disclosed until 1987, when H.
Montgomery Hyde's biography, George Blake: Superspy, was published. Blake
had apparently realized that he stood no change of being swopped for a British
spy, as he had nothing left to offer the KGB, and had decided that he would
have to arrange his own escape. Bourke's motive for agreeing to help him
seems to have been a combination of adventurism and inate anti-British,
Republican sentiments.
Blake s successful escape served to nullify much of the intelligence advantage
achieved by Lecky who, after hours of interrogation, had been able to build a
comprehensive damage assessment report of Blake's work for the Soviets. Of
course, Blake's co-operation in this exercise had been kept a closely guarded
secret, but this was no doubt revealed to the KGB once Blake arrived behind
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the Iron Curtain. Even as late as 1987, when the amateurish nature of the
whole escape plot was confirmed for the first time, some retired members of
the Friends seemed unwilling to accept that Blake's escape had been master-
minded not by the KGB's Rezident in London, but by a group consisting of
nobody more sinister than an Irish petty criminal and two left-wing political
activists.
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The Defector Syndrome
Penetration is the technique par excellence of counter-espionage operations:
James McCargar, The Spy arul his Masters'
Although it had generally been widely anticipated that Maurice Oldfield
would succeed White upon the latter s retirement in 1968, the appointment
was not made. Nor, for that matter, did White actually retire. Instead, he
moved into the Cabinet Office with the new title of Intelligence Co-ordinator
to the Cabinet. In his place Labour s Foreign Secretary George Brown chose
Sir John Rennie, a regular diplomat whose only experience of the secret world
had been one posting behind the Iron Curtain, in Warsaw, and five years
running the Information Research Department during the turbulent mid-1950s
when propaganda seemed one of the few effective weapons left in Britain's
depleted arsenal. Rennie's promotion must have been a cruel blow for Oldfield
who, despite his donnish, relaxed appearance, was intensely ambitious. Perhaps
worse was the verdict expressed in Rennie's eventual obituary in The Times
in November 1981 which claimed that Rennie had been made CSS because
'No suitable candidate was at that time available from within the Service.'
There may well have been a struggle for power in the top echelons of Whitehall
as White s departure approached, after twelve years as CSS, but in operational
terms the change was not to make much difference until the civil rights
campaign in Northern Ireland exploded into Republican-sponsored violence
and the Friends were asked to intervene. Craig Smellie, the Arabist who had
served in Alexandria before the Suez crisis, and had subsequently headed the
stations in Baghdad, Rome, Khartoum and Tripoli, was posted to Belfast to
reinforce the very limited intelligence apparatus already in existence. At the
end of a stormy, two-year tour, Smellie moved on to Athens, leaving MI5,
the Speaal Branch and numerous military intelligence units, all with over-
lapping briefs, to continue the rivalry and muddle.
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The Defector Syndrome 159
Because of SIS's continuing presence in Belfast, and the nature of its
activities, little can usefully be said about intelligence operations in the
province. They are quite obviously at the 'sharp end' of the clandestine effort
to suppress terrorism, a role that cannot be undertaken with any hope of
success if its methods are to be disclosed. Nevertheless, there have been a
couple of rare occasions when outsiders have been given an opportunity to
glimpse SIS in action. One was the imaginative project launched by an
untraceable travel firm called Casuro, based in an accommodation address in
central London and equipped only with a telephone answering machine. Letters
from Casuro addressed to various people informed them that they had won
a competition and awarded prizes. The individuals selected by Casuro hap-
pened to be leading members of extremist Republican parties and, having
accepted an invitation to enjoy an all-expenses-paid holiday in Torremolinos,
they were approached by other 'contestants' who were really SIS personnel
making a bid~to recruit them as informers. The scheme was eventually wound
up after a couple from Dublin, both founder members of the Irish Republican
Socialist Party, the political wing of the Irish National Liberation Army, went
on a free trip to Spain sponsored by Casuro but then rejected SIS's offer and
denounced Casuro in the press. SIS's hidden involvement in the affair was
revealed when it was learned that Casuro's single telephone line terminated
inside the building occupied by SIS's London Station.
In another incident which was reported publicly, in December 1972, a Garda
Special Branch detective was arrested in a Dublin hotel on a charge of supplying
a Briton named John Wyman with classified reports about the IRA from the
Garda's files. Much secrecy surrounded the subsequent prosecution which was
concluded with the conviction, in camera, of both defendants and their immedi-
ate release. Observers suspected that the case had the familiar ring of 'unofficial
assistance' that had somehow come unstuck Both these examples demonstrate
the high-risk character?of intelligence-gathering in Ireland, but the fact that
they ended in failure does not imply ineptitude. Certainly, the Casuro was an
ingenious contrivance to lure potential informers with proven access to neutral
ground where, surrounded by a friendly but alien environment, congenial case
officers could undermine the resistance of Republican activists with minimal
danger. Given the fluid composition and methodology of the terrorist move-
ments deployed in Northern Ireland, and the strict limitations imposed on the
security forces, the authorities have only a narrow range of resources to fall
back on. Signal interception, covert surveillance, aerial photography, prisoner
inteaogation and other standard techniques can offer tactical advantages, but
are unlikely to provide the key, strategic information that can be supplied by
awell-placed informant. The recruitment of agents and the infiltration of moles
into the various target groups represents the most effective, and the most
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160 The Friends
hazardous, means of acquiring the kind of useful data that, when skilfully
exploited, could lead to the complete elimination of a modern terrorist organ-
ization.
Since containment, let alone elimination, is an objective that still eludes the
authorities in Northern Ireland, continued discretion should be exercised and
we should tum to SIS's main preoccupation during the remainder of Rennie's
tenure: the threat posed by the Soviets.
By the time Christopher Phillpotts retired in 1970, he was entirely satisfied
that his task of cleansing the Friends of hostile penetration had been completed
and that the Service was free of any moles. How could he have been so certain?
There are several ways of judging the relative integrity of a security or
intelligence agency, but the best is a demonstrable ability to keep secrets and
run good cases. The definition of the latter is not the kind of operation like
Operation PRINCE or the Penkovsky affair, which seemed to go well while
they lasted, but rather the more concrete achievement of running an agent,
protecting him as a source, and ensuring his safe arrival when eventually he
decides to complete his defection by escaping. When Phillpotts left Century
House two such projects had been initiated and were to go smoothly to reach
a successful conclusion.
One of the results of the molehunts had been the division of the Security
Service's counter-espionage branch, D Branch, into two K Branches, designated
'KX' and'KY' respectively, to separate investigations from counter-intelligence
operations. It was one way to mark the end of an era and start afresh. Now
SIS was to embark upon on a new period of co-operation with the Security
Service, targeting the numerous Soviet 'legal' facilities in London Eor joint
attention.
Of course SIS had long enjoyed its own London Station which, under
Nicholas Elliott back in 1956, had run Buster Crabb's ill-fated mission. In more
recent years it had operated independently of the Security Service, almost like
any other overseas station, as though the host territory was in a Foreign
capital. From its headquarters in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, SIS mounted
routine operations in support of the Belfast Station, exercised clandestine
technical surveillance of target diplomatic missions and liaised more closely
with MI5.
One of the first such operations had started out as a possible honeytrap,
organized by MI5's K Branch, involving a member of the Soviet Trade
Delegation named Oleg Lyalin who, through routine surveillance, was dis-
covered to be conducting an illicit affair with his Russian secretary, Irina
Teplyakova. The approach made to Lyalin proved entirely welcome, and he
offered to defect with his girlfriend there and then. The two case officers in
charge of the operation persuaded him to remain in place, at least for the time
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The Defector Syndrome 161
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being, and gather information. Lyalin turned out to be an undercover KGB
officer, so he was able to supply invaluable data concerning the Soviet order
of battle at the trade mission's headquarters and the Embassy. The case went
extremely well but was eventually terminated, at the end of August 1971,
when Lyalin was arrested by the police in London for drunken driving. As a
trade official and not a regular diplomat, Lyalin could not claim immunity and
was taken to a police station for the night before appearing in a magistrates
court the following morning. Another KGB officer, Aleksandr Abramov,
fumed up in court to pay Lyalin's bail, but the charges against him had been
dropped, on the Home Secretary's sanction, and he had already been reunited
with Irma in preparation of months of debriefing. The most immediate conse-
quence of Lyalin's defection was the rounding up of his network, which had
included two Greek Cypriots and a Malayan, who worked in the vehicle
registration department of the local authority. He had been providing the
KGB with details of cars used for surveillance by MI5 and SIS. All three
agents were convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment.
Partly due to testimony from Lyalin, ninety Soviet diplomats were expelled
from Britain and a further fifteen who were already abroad were excluded
from returning. Overnight, London had been transfomted into a hostile
environment Eor the KGB. Over the following fifteen years, as a result of
greater liaison and co-operation, the KGB was forced on to the defensive all
over the world and more than 700 Soviets were to be thrown out of
countries for 'activity not compatible with diplomacy', the polite international
euphemism for spying.
The second crucial case, already in the development stage when Phillpotts
retired, was that of Oleg Gordievsky, then Third Secretary at the Soviet
Embassy in Copenhagen, a aty that Phillpotts knew well, having been Head
of Station there in the early 1950s. Gordievsky had arrived in Denmark in
January 1966, his first posting abroad, and was to remain there until the end
of February 1970. He was later to return in October 1972 with the rank of
Second Secretary and, after a promotion in November 1976, fulfilled the role
of Press Attache until July 1978.
Although Copenhagen may seem an unlikely centre of espionage, the key
high-flyers chosen by the Friends to run the local station is an indication of its
standing in the league tables of international intrigue. The station had been
opened after the war by Leslie Mitchell, and among his successors were Harry
Carr, formerly the Controller Northern Area, Charles de Salis and Machlachlan
Silverwood-Cope who, like Mitchell, was to run the Washington Station in
the late 1950s.
Gordievsky's recruitment by SIS, perhaps with the assistance of the Danish
intelligence service, was revealed on IZ September 1985 when the British
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Foreign Office announced his defection. The official statement disclosed that
Gordievsky, aged forty-six, had made his move 'several weeks' earlier and was
'in a position to know the full details of Soviet intelligence activities and
personnel in this country'. A brief biography of him suggested that he had
graduated from a KGB training school in 1963 and had 'spent much of the
next ten years dealing, both in Moscow and abroad, with Soviet "illegals"'.
He had come to Britain in June 1982 with the rank of Counsellor and 'had
recently become the head of the KGB residency in London'. A further statement
announced the immediate expulsion of twenty-five Soviet officials who had
been named by Gordievsky as intelligence officers. The Danish authorities
were quick to leak their involvement in the operation, prompting Michael
Lyngbo, deputy head of Denmark's tiny intelligence service, to fly to London
for hasty consultations with the Friends. By the time he had returned to
Copenhagen, the gossip had been stopped but the damage had already been
done. Far from being a spontaneous defector, as the KG B might have suspected,
or a recently recruited source, Gordievsky was revealed in his true colours as
an agent of remarkably long-standing.
During Gordievsky's period in Copenhagen, one Dane had been discovered
spying for the Russians and seven diplomats had been declared yersonae non
gratae, but evidently the Soviets had not suspected that their own RezidenEura
might have been penetrated. A similar incident took place in London within
months of his arrival to act as deputy to Arkadi Gouk, the local KGB RezidenE.
Early on Easter Sunday, Gouk had received an anonymous letter purporting
to come from someone with access to secret information. To establish his bona
j9des the correspondent had enclosed a genuine document, prepared by MI5's
K Branch, describing the circumstances of the recent expulsion of three Soviet
diplomats. Surprised by this windfall, Gouk had consulted with his deputy and
concluded that it was nothing more than a clumsy provocation. In reality, it
was a genuine attempt by Michael Bettaney, athirty-three-year-old misfit, to
betray his colleagues in the Security Service.
Bettaney made two further offers to Gouk using routine tradecraft to
avoid detection, but meanwhile Gordievsky had alerted the Friends, who had
organized their own surveillance operation to catch the anonymous traitor in
MI5's K Branch. Bettaney was spotted when he made a third, late-night visit
to Gouk's London home on 10 July 1983, leaving a final set of instructions
on how he should be contacted. Having identified Bettaney as the spy, he was
placed under skilled observation until sufficient evidence could be found to
justify his arrest. One additional problem that had to be taken into consideration
was Gordievsky's security. The reason for Bettaney's an est had to be plausible
enough to convince Gouk that there had not been a leak from within his
own organization. Bettaney was eventually an;ested on 16 September while
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The Defector Syndrome 163
planning an approach to the Soviet Embassy in Vienna. When the evidence
of Bettaney's duplicity was later presented at his trial, it was alleged that
Bettaney's own eccentric behaviour and some of his indiscreet questions had
been enough to compromise him and initiate a molehunt. In reality, of course,
Gordievsky must have experienced some anxious moments pondering whether
the unknown mole in K Branch was aware of his own secret role, or whether
Bettaney could be identified and eliminated before Gouk decided to take him
up on his offer and establish contact with him.
Gordievsky's position proved resilient enough to cope with the pressures
of Bettaney's arrest and trial, and he was later promoted to Rezident when
Gouk was expelled Eor receiving Bettaney's messages. Thus, ironically, the
incident which at one moment threatened to jeopardize Gordievsky actually
helped improve his standing within the KGB. However, he was recalled
unexpectedly to Moscow Eor consultations in July the Following year and
seized the opportunity to vanish there, leaving his wife and two children
behind. The circumstances of his passage back to England were quite extra-
ordinary. It took place while Moscow's local security apparatus was at full
stretch coping with some 30,000 students attending the IZth World Festival
of Youth. Coincidentally, a cocktail party was held at the British Embassy by
the Ambassador, Sir Bryan Cartledge, and Gordievsky was smuggled past the
Soviet militiamen guarding the Embassy gates in the back of a guest's diplo-
matic car.
After spending the night in the Embassy, Gordievsky climbed into one of
the two specially adapted Commer vans that periodically cant' non-urgent
diplomatic freight north by road to Helsinki via Leningrad. Once across the
frontier at Vybourg-Vaalimaa where, by convention, diplomatic vehicles and
their passengers are exempted from checks, Gordievsky's arrival in the Finnish
capital was concealed by the unusually large retinue accompanying the British
Foreign Secretary to attend a European Security Conference. Once his journey
to England had been completed, the lengthy debriefing sessions began.
Throughout the tense months of Gordievsky's double life in London, the
Friends kept in constant contact with him and his acquaintances so that his
behaviour could be monitored. One of those in touch with both Gordievsky
and Colin Figures, who supervised the case personally, was Neville Beale, a
senior member of the Conservative group on the Greater London Council,
elected by the Prime Ministefs constituency, Finchley, and a former Chairman
of the Chelsea Conservative Association. Beale, who had met Figures socially
some years earlier, had been introduced to Gordievsky by a Conservative
Party Official at a reception held by the Embassy and invited him to lunch at
the GLCs headquarters. Thereafter, they met occasionally for lunch. After
each meeting Beale would prepare a report for one of Figures's case officers
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and undergo an informal debriefing session, usually conducted discreetly in a
restaurant. This arrangement continued until Gordievsky sent a message to
Beale cancelling along-standing luncheon appointment because of his sudden
recall to Moscow. That was the signal for SIS to put into operation its
contingency plans for an emergency rescue, not entirely dissimilar from those
which failed to exfiltrate Penkovsky. Whilst there had always been a residual
danger that Gordievsky's role in the exposure of Bettaney might be compro-
mised, SIS went to considerable lengths to avoid jeopardizing him. When, for
example, the Security Commission made its own investigation of the Bettaney
case, a conflict arose. It was recognized that the preservation of Gordievsky
as a source was absolutely vital and, accordingly, the Commission's final
report, part of which was made public in May 1985 while Gordievsky was
still in place in London, was not entirely frank on the issue of exactly how
Bettaney had originally been identified as a traitor. The report claimed that
Bettaney had drawn attention to himself by his asking questions about
sensitive matters, completely unrelated to his work'. It was hoped that this
misleading explanation would satisfy the Soviets and allow Gordievsky to
continue his covert work for SIS. If the ruse achieved the desired effect, the
London Rezidenfura would escape suspicion and Gordievsky would be free to
carry on with his career. The rather more fundamental issue of who took the
decision to mislead the Commission, or whether the Commission willingly
collaborated in order to protect Gordievsky, has not been revealed, or publicly
debated, in spite of the obvious implications. After all, if the Commission had
complied with an understandable request to participate in a deliberate decep-
tion, as can be seen to have been practised how would it answer the charge
that it had abandoned its integrity and maybe discredited itself for the future?
The alternative scenario, demanding full candour from both MI5 and SIS,
whatever the consequences for blown' sources, could hardly be expected to
find favour either. Thus Gordievsky's hair-raising experience of fending off
Bettaney did not end with his an;est. Indeed, it was that very act which proved
to be the catalyst for some hard decision-making.
Gordievsky's defection and his successful escape from the Soviet Union
were both extraordinary coups, but they were far from unique. At about the
time Gordievsky was preparing himself for his new post in London in 1982,
one of his KGB colleagues, Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, was making contact
with the SIS Station in Iran and negotiating his defection. He had been attached
to the Soviet Consulate in Tehran since 1977, with special responsibility for
running 'illegals'. Once again, with his defection, the KGB sustained appalling
damage to its organization in the Middle East, and SIS received a powerful
boost to its morale. On that occasion selected journalists were invited, one at
a time, to the Carlton Tower Hotel in Knightsbridge. to meet him and hear,
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The Defector Syndrome 165
first-hand, about Soviet objectives in the region. This useful defection was also
fumed into a neat propaganda exercise.
In recent years the pressure on the KGB from defections has escalated
dramatically. In March 1985, Igor Gheja, a Third Secretary at the Soviet
Embassy in Delhi, switched sides; he was followed in May by Sergei Bokhan,
the ranking GRU officer in Athens who turned himself over to the CIA. Then,
in the last week of July 1985, Vitali Yurchenko, a senior KGB officer who had
once been in charge of security at the Washington Embassy, defected to the
CIA in Rome. This particular episode only lasted until 2 November when
Yurchenko, depressed by three months of intensive debriefing and a rejection
from his former lover, the wife of a Soviet diplomat in Montreal, sought
sanctuary at his old Embassy. Whatever the cause of his change of heart, his
'meal-ticket' had been worthwhile to the CIA.
Such defections are important to intelligence agencies, not just for the value
of the data received, but the implicit assurance that all is well within the
organization itself. The Friends agonized for years over the probability that
they had been penetrated at a high level, and went through the trauma of
tracking down and isolating Philby and Blake. Steps were then taken, judged
ruthless by some, to eliminate the possibility that other ideologically motivated
traitors had followed in their path. Various officers, who had fallen under
suspicion, had had their careers terminated. The successful resettlement of
Oleg Lyalin, Oleg Gordievsky and Vladimir Kuzichkin is eloquent testimony
to the eventual success of the counter-measures taken to ensure the integrity
of what Monty Woodhouse termed that 'department in the Foreign Office
known politely, but not very sincerely, as the Friends'. The price, however,
was often painfully high, as Maurice Oldfield, who succeeded Sir John Rennie
as CSS in February 1973, could testify.
The dreumstances of Oldfield's succession were inauspiaous. John Rennie's
son and daughter-in-law had been charged with illegal possession of heroin
and the publicity that followed made his position untenable. Accordingly, his
Vice-Chief took over and, instead of taking up another intelligence post in the
Cabinet Office as Dick White had done on his retirement when he had
been made Intelligence Co-ordinator, Rennie moved down to the country
permanently. .
Oldfield had little in common with his six predecessors. He was an academic
at heart, who might have pursued a useful career as a medievalist at some
university. He came from a humble background, being the eldest of eleven
children bom to a tenant farmer in the tiny Derbyshire village of Over Haddon.
He had been educated at local state schools and had never married. His
commission in the Intelligence Corps had been gained after lengthy service as
an NCO in a Field Security Section in the Middle East during the war, and
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his recruitment into the Friends had been fortuitous, owing to the appointment
of his direct superior in SIME, Douglas Roberts, to RS in 1946. IE this was
not enough to distinguish him from the other men who had held the post of
CSS, he was the first to attend a redbrick university (he went to Manchester,
while his two predecessors, Rennie and White, were both Oxford men) and
the first to rise through the organization, having served at SIS stations abroad.
He had completed two tours in Singapore and had followed John Briance to
Washington in 1960, where he had been based for four years before returning
to understudy White. He was also the first to have been commissioned from
the ranks, having ended the war as alieutenant-colonel.
Perhaps because of his academic inclinations, Oldfield made a good pro-
fessional intelligence officer who fitted well into SIS's post-war regime. He
had many supporters among those who had served with him in SIME and
had made the same switch to SIS, some of whom were also to rise to senior
positions in the organization. Oldfield's rose was first identified to the public
when Philby paid him the compliment in his autobiography of describing him
as 'formidable' and 'an officer of high quality'. Evidently this accolade did
not cut much ice somewhere in Whitehall, for its publication coincided with
the decision to appoint Rennie, an outsider, to take over SIS upon White's
retirement in 1968.
Although Oldfield was well liked by his colleagues in Cairo, Singapore and
Broadway, his greatest contribution to the intelligence community probably
took place during his tenure of the Washington Station, a post that just nine
years earlier had been occupied by Philby. The four Heads of Station who had
served in the intervening period had all been made perfectly aware of the
acute sensitivity of their position, which demanded a high degree of goodwill
and mutual trust if the liaison was to be fruitful. Many of the old guard, on
both sides of the Atlantic, had been- willing to give the personable Philby the
benefit of the doubt when he was still ensconced in Lebanon, in frequent
contact with both the CIA and SIS Stations in Beirut; for as long as his case
was unresolved, the Americans were willing to be cautious, even sceptical, but
never hostile. That situation was to alter in January 1963 when Philby
unexpectedly fled to Moscow, leaving Oldfield to break the news to John
McCone, the CIA's recently appointed Director. Suspicion is one thing, but
absolute confirmation of treachery is quite another, and it fell to Oldfield to
heal the wounds.
Oldfield's success, in spite of being a bachelor, was in part due to his
commitment to Penkovsky at a time when the world seemed on the brink of
atomic war. Penkovsky's data gave the West a unique insight into the Kremlin's
strategy and reassured those analysts who had succumbed to the missile gap
theory. Although there were to be recriminations and an enduring debate
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much later over the authenticity of Penkovsky's information, it was regarded
at the time'as an invaluable motherlode and a rare opportunity to restore the
special relationship between SIS and the CIA. To a large extent the donnish
Oldfield Fulfilled his mission and smoothed the way Eor Philipotts, who was
to take over the station in 1964.
Oldfield's return to London coincided with the election of a Labour admin-
istration and an intention, fuelled by political and economic arguments, to
reduce Britain's role as a world power. The most immediate impact of the
change in government for the Friends was a new era of strict financial control,
and the first of a series of station amalgamations which served to eliminate
certain stations judged to be relatively unproductive. Even though the Friends
were to take over responsibility for some of the former colonies like Nigeria
(and South Africa, which had left the Commonwealth in 1961), where pre-
viously MI5's E Branch had, by convention, posted Security Liaison Officers,
their brief was on the decline. This process was eventually to leave SIS with
just one station in South America, increasing the burden on the Buenos Aires
Head of Station and diminishing the quality and flow of useful information
from the continent. The gradual but deliberate run-down of SIS's overseas
representation may have been a factor in the lack of advance warning Eor the
conflict with Argentina more than a decade later, but it also changed the nature
of the new relationship with the CIA and emphasized the trend towards
acceptance of GCHQ's product which, thanks to technical breakthroughs in
the data-processing field, was proving both reliable and cost-effective. SIS was
to be trimmed to reflect Britain's status as a small debtor nation, with ascaled-
down army, manoeuvring to join the EEC. In November 1967, the remaining
troops fighting a rearguard action in Aden were evacuated, leaving Britain
with few overseas assets left to defend. Even Rhodesia, which had declared
independence unilaterally in 1965 and was a high political priority for the
Government, needed few intelligence-gathering resources devoted to the
problem given the long relationship the Friends had enjoyed with the Rho-
desian Central Intelligence Organization. Indeed, the CIO's Director, Ken
Flower, 'contrived to visit relatives in the UK several times a year from 1968-
80' and met the Friends every time.
The concern that SIS's leaner profile would inhibit Britain's ability to conduct
military operations abroad was tested in Oman in 1971, when the Government
authorized a covert intervention by a Special Air Service squadron to suppress
a rebellion against the Sultan. The campaign was eventually concluded five
years later when the insurrection was quelled, with only peripheral political
help from the Friends.
There were numerous consequences of the financial squeeze on SIS during
the late 1960s. The reduced demand for personnel enabled the Friends to pick
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only the best of those opting for a career in the Foreign Service. It was
occasionally said that the best way to identify a Head of Station in a British
diplomatic mission was by judging the secretarial staff: SIS secretaries were
often smarter and brighter than the Foreign Office regulars. In some places
the overseas stations were cut to just two people, forcing them to concentrate
on liaison rather than acquisition. In strategic teens the lower volume of
assessments from key stations altered the balance of the intelligence input to
the JIC in favour of GCHQ, with the result that rather more weight was
given to SIGINT analysis. Perhaps not surprisingly one factor accounting for
the absence of any sensible advance notice of the Argentine invasion of the
Falklands in 1982 was the assurance given by the signal interpreters that
certain troop movements, such as those by crack Argentine commando units
moving away from their usual positions on the Chilean frontier, would betray
an intention to prepare for an amphibious assault. The junta would certainly
deploy its best-trained troops Eor a complex operation, and the wireless traffic
of the units concerned was monitored constantly. The slightest hint of a
change in procedure, or anything that might indicate a transfer to a new
location, would be noted instantly. Withdrawal, assembly and embarkation, it
was confidently stated, would be accompanied by a perceptible increase in
Argentine signal patterns which, in turn, would be scrutinized. In the event,
and contrary to all the appreciations made at the time, untried marine conscripts
speazheaded the landings, and the regular commandos who had attracted
the close surveillance were never deployed beyond the Andes. In those
circumstances the SIGINT analysts were caught by surprise and never deliv-
ered the promised alert.
The tighter budget also bore some internal security implications for the
Friends: a smaller order of battle makes for greater vulnerability to hostile
penetration and an easier tazget for the opposition As has akeady been seen,
the most damaging and divisive molehunts were conducted during this period,
and Oldfield was in the thick of them upon his return to London.
During the latter period of his career Oldfield was necessarily preoccupied
with the menace of an expanding KGB presence in the West and the messy
conflict in Northern Ireland. On one memorable occasion he gathered his staff
into the canteen in Century House to assure them that SIS's activities in the
province, which had commenced eazly in 1971 in spite of Oldfield's initial
objections, did not include authorizing bank raids, as had been claimed by a
freelandng part-time informant and armed robber named Kenneth Littlejohn.
Oldfield ended his career with the Friends in April 1978, having recom-
mended his Vice-Chief, Dickie Franks, to succeed him. Franks was the last
of the wartime intake from SOE and his career had taken him to stations in
Cairo, Tehran and Bonn
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When Oldfield retired, he moved into digs in Iffley so as to undertake a
year of historical research at All Souls, apparently in order to see whether he
wanted to return to academic scholarship. However, in September the following
year he was offered a job by the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, as
Co-ordinator of Security and Intelligence in Northern Ireland. This post was
an innovation, but was founded on the work done by Dick White after his
official retirement from the Friends back in 1968. As Intelligence Co-ordinator
to the Cabinet, a special niche had been created for him to bridge the CSS,
the Director-General of MI5 and the Chairman of the JIC. White had stayed
until 1972 when Sir Leonard Hooper, the retiring Director of GCHQ, had
taken up the role; he had been succeeded in 1978 by Sir Brooks Richards, a
regular diplomat and former SOE hand.
Richards's task had been to oversee the work of the two organizations, but
his brief had not extended to Ulster where, until 1971, domestic intelligence
had been handled exclusively by the Royal Ulster Constabulary's Special
Branch. However, with the establishment of SIS's Station in Lisburn, and MI5's
local office in downtown Belfast, there was plenty of opportunity to exacerbate
the scene which had already been complicated by differing objectives of the
amty's military intelligence units and the Special Branch. A disastrous conflict
had arisen between the detectives, who were anxious to play a lengthy game
of careful surveillance and infiltration, and the soldiers, who were under
pressure to produce quick results. The incompatability of their motives had
led to some awkward incidents and seemed likely to bring their operations to
a state of paralysis. Inter-service communication had almost broken down and
several of those directly involved were openly distrustful of each other.
The assassination of Airey Neave just before the general election in 1979
demonstrated to the incoming Prime Minister the urgency and magnitude of
the threat posed by the ten orists, who evidently could not be contained in
the province by the existing security aaangements. The neat solution to the
overlapping intelligence briefs was the appointment of a co-ordinator of
sufficient stature as to command the respect of all the interested parties in
Belfast's recondite intelligence apparatus. Oldfield's mission was to move into
Stormont Castle, sort out the personality clashes and restore co-operation.
Oldfield stayed at his post in Ulster less than six months. His departure, at
the end of March 1980, followed his volunteered admission to the Cabinet
Secretary that he had not been entirely candid when he had been routinely
interviewed for his Positive Vetting security clearance. Like all his subordinates,
the CSS was required to undergo the PV procedure every five years. The first
stage of the system is a detailed questionnaire which has to be completed by
the PV candidate. Once completed, the foml is followed up with an interview
conducted by a field investigator, usually a retired SIS officer, who will seek
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answers to highly pertinent questions about homosexuality, drug and alcohol
abuse, indebtedness and membership of political parties. Although Oldfield
had consistently denied ever having been a homosexual since the introduction
of the measure in I95Z, the truth was that he had indeed had such experience,
albeit not very recently. The statement meant his access to secret material was
suspended automatically and he never went back to Ireland. In fact, he was
already in Failing health and early in March the following year he died of
cancer of the stomach.
Oldfield's post at Stormont was quickly filled by Brooks Richards, with a
trouble-shooting diplomat, Sir Antony Duff, taking over as Cabinet Intelligence
Co-ordinator. Following the publication of the Franks Report into the back-
ground of the Falklands crisis, and the criticism it contained of the management
of the JIC's assessment staff, Duff supplanted (Sir) Patrick Wright as Chairman
of the JIC; in 1985, he was to move yet again, to replace Sir John Jones as
Director-General of the Security Service in the wake of the Bettaney case.
The Joint Intelligence mechanism in Whitehall proved itself to be unable to
collate all the different strands of data, and consequently certain key items of
information were overlooked. Too much emphasis was placed on the SIGINT
component and too little attention given to the reports from people on the
spot in Argentina: the captain of HMS Endurance, the Royal Navy's single
vessel in the area; the hopelessly overburdened Defence Attache; and SIS's
last Head of Station in South America. All sent timely warnings to their
respective organizations in London about what they saw as dangerous develop-
ments, but the JIC drew quite the wrong conclusions. Thus, for all the
sophistication of satellite surveillance systems, and G CHQ's many interception
sites dotted across the globe, it fell to one of the Friends to cable his misgivings,
only to have his message pigeon-holed ... as nothing more than advice from
friendly circles.
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Notes
Introduction
1 These files, in the FO 369-72 series at the Public Records Office, provided
much of the documentary basis of MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service
Operations 1909-45.
2 J.C. Masterman, On the Chariot Wheel (OUP, Oxford, 1975); Sir Percy
Sillitoe, Cloak without Dagger (Cassell, London, 1955); Derek Tangye, Moon-
light on a Lake in Bond Sheet (Norton, New York, 1961) and The Way to
Minack (Michael Joseph, London, 1978); Lord Rothschild, Random Vari-
ables (Collins, London, I984); Peter Wright, Spycatcher (Heinemann, Sydney,
1987).
3 Gerald Glover, 115 Park Street (privately published).
4 F. H. Hinsley, E. E. Thomas, C. F. G. Ransom, R. C. Knight, British Intelligence
in the Second World War (HMSO, London, 1979, 1983, 1984, 1988).
5 Sir Harry hiinsley and C. A. G. Simkins, Security and Counter-Intelligence (to
be published by HMSO).
6 A censored version of Greek Memories was released by Cassell in 1939. A
new edition, with all the original 1932 text restored, was published in 1987
by the University Press of America, edited by Tom Troy.
7 Bill Graham, Break-In (Bodley Head, London, 1987). Others in this genre
include Patrick Seale, The Hilton Assignment (Temple Smith, London, 1973);
Leslie Aspin, I, Kovaks (Everest, London, 1975); Gayle Rivers (pseud.), The
Specialist (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1985); Peter Stiff, See You in November
(Galago, 1985).
8 Falklands Island Review. Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors, Cmnd 8787
(HMSO, London, 1983).
9 Peter Hennessy, Cabintt, p. IZO.
10 Ibid., p. I13.
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I Geoffrey McDermott, The Eden Legacy, p. 144.
2 David Footman wrote four novels -The Yellow Rock, The Mine in the Desert,
Pig and Pepper and Pemberton; two books of short stories, Half-Way East and
Better Forgotten; and a travelogue, Balkan Holiday.
3 David Footman, The Russian Revolution, p. 121.
4 Robert Carew-Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism, p. 263.
5 Kim Philby, My Silent War, p. 123.
6 Now the 9th Duke of Portland; see Patrick Howarth's Intelligence Chief
Extraordinary.
7 Kenneth Strong, Intelligence at fhe Top, p. 213.
2 The British Control Commission for Germany
I John Bruce Lockhart, Intelligence: A British Viers, p.37.
2 This individual is still alive but, although confirming his pre-war membership
of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he has always denied having spied
for the Soviets.
3 James McGovern, Crossbow and Overcast, p. 20I.
4 Ibid.
5 G. A Tokaev, Comrade X, p. 357.
'b Reinhard Gehlen, The Service, p.122.
7 Ibid., p. 123.
8 Ibid., p. I54.
9 Commander Courtney, later Conservative MP for Harrow East 1959-bb,
was subsequently the victim of a Soviet honeytrap; see Sailor in a Russian
Frame, p. 55.
1 PRO/C0537/2270.
2 Sir Noel Charles to Foreign Office, 10 January 1946.
3 Bickham Sweet-Escott, Bake Street Irrtgular, p. 27.
4 Menachem Begin, The Revolt, p. 99.
5 Ibid., p. 97.
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4 Malaya 1948-54
1 Quoted in Harry Miller, Jungle War in Malaya, p. 70.
2 Sir Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, p. 85.
3 Lord Chandos, Memoirs of Lord Chandos, p. 366.
5 Kim Philby and VALUABLE
1 Anatoli Golitsyn, New Lies for Old, p. 71.
2 Philby, op. cit., p. 13.
3 Sunday Times, 27 March 1988.
4 Philby, op. cit., p. 7Z.
5 PRO FO/37I7I687.
6 Philby, op. cit., p. 116.
7 Ibid., p. I35.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p.14Z.
10 David Smiley, Albanian Assignment, p. I63.
II Philby, op. cit., p. 162.
12 Ibid., p. I6I.
I3 Smiley, op. cit., p. 164.
14 Philby, op. cit., p. 165.
IS H. Montgomery Hyde, The Quiet Canadian, p. I8.
I6 Philby, op. cit., p. 117.
6 Cyprus 1955-60
1 Lockhart, op. cit., p. 41.
1 Anthony Eden, Full Circle, p. 108.
Z Marshall Pugh, Frogman, p. 172.
3 Geoffrey McDermott, The Eden Legacy, p. IZ9.
4 The Timis, 30 April 1956.
5 Hansard, 4 May 1956.
6 Ibid., 14 May 1956.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
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9 Daily Express, 11 June 1957.
8 Operation BOOT
1 Miles Copeland, The Rea! Spy Wvrld, p. 93.
2 C. M. Woodhouse, Something Ventured, p. 111.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 110.
5 Ibid., p. llb.
6 Ibid., p. 117.
7 Ibid., p. 118.
8 .Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup, p. 107.
9 Ibid., p. 123.
10 Woodhouse, op. cit., p. 12.5.
11 See Sir Shapoor Reporter's entry in Who's Who.
12 Roosevelt, op. cit., p. 190.
13 Ihid., p. 205.
14 Ib;d.
15 Woodhouse, op. cit., p. 230.
Ib /bid., p.131.
9 Operation STRAGGLE
1 Roy Fullick and Geoffrey Powell, Suer The Double War, p. 62.
l For differing versions of the scale of the CIA's involvement with the Free
Officers, compare Miles Copeland in T1u Game of Nations, p. 62, with Wilbur
Crane Eveland in Ropes of Sand, p. 97.
3 Copeland, ibid.
4 Former CIA Station Chief in Paris, 24 August 1987.
5 Philby, op. cit., p. 192.
6 Hansard, 7 November 1955.
7 McDermott, op. cit., p. 133.
8 Field Marshal Montgomery speaking in the House of Lords, 16 March 1962
(Hansard, vol. 238, cols 1002-3).
9 McDermott, op. cit., p. 132.
10 See Brian Lapping's End of Empire (Granada, London, 1985) for Nutting's
confirmation that he had toned down Eden's exact words in his auto-
biography, No End of a Lesson.
11 McDermott, op. ciE., p. 133.
12 Anthony Nutting, No End of a Lesson, p. 99.
13 Eyewitness account.
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14 Fullick and Powell, op. cit., p. 61.
IS Hansard, 20 December 1956.
Ib Ibid., 3I October 1956.
17 Keesings Contemporary Archive, 1957, Co1.15679.
is Ibid.
I9 Evelyn Shuckburgh, Descent from Suez Diaries 1951-6, p. 361.
20 Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, p. 369.
10 The Penkovsky Defection
1 Anatoli Golitsyn, New Lies far Old, p. 54.
2 Greville Wynne, The Man from Odessa, p. 217.
3 Anthony Verner, Through the Looking Glass, p. 213.
4 See David Howarth's The Shetland Bus (Nelson & Sons, London, 1951).
5 . Philby, op. cit., p. 147.
6 Keesings Contemporary Archives, Co1.19623.
7 Interview with Peter Denabin, 2Z September 1987.
8 Keesings Contemporary Archives, Co1.19625.
9 Ibid.
IO Greville Wynne, The Man from Moscow, p. Z5.
11 Ibid., p. 130.
IZ Wynne, The Man from Odessa, p. iii.
13 Frank Gibney and Peter Denabin, The Penkovsky Papers, p. 340.
I4 Ibid., p.370.
Il The Blake Catastrophe
I David C. Martin, iMlderness of Mirrors, p. 99.
Z McDermott, op. cit., p. i82.
1 Robert Cecil, The Missing Dimension, p. I97.
Z Ismail Akhmedov, In and Out of Stalin's GRLI, p. 191.
3 Ibid., p. I97.
4 Donald Prater later wrote European of Yesterday (OUP, Oxford, 1972), a
biography of Stefan Zweig, and A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria
Rilke (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986).
13 The Defector Syndrome
I James McCargar, The Spy and his Masters, p. 131.
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Bibliography
Akhmedov, Ismail, In and Out of Stalin's GRCI (Amts & Armour Press, London,
1984)
Begin, Menachem, The Revolt (W. H. Allen, London, 1979)
Bourke, Sean, The Springing of George Blake (Cassell, London, 1970)
Carew-Hunt, Robert, The Theory and Practice of Communism (Geoffrey Bles,
London, 1950)
Cavendish, Anthony, Inside Intelligence (privately published, 1987)
Cecil, Robert, The Missing Dimension (Macmillan, London, 1984)
Chandos, Lord, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos (Bodley Head, London, 1962)
Chisholm, Roderick, Ladysmith (Osprey, London, 1979)
Cookridge, E. H., Shadow of a Spy (Leslie Frewin, London, I96Z)
Copeland, Miles, The Game of Nations (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, London, 1969)
Copeland, Miles, The Real Spy World (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, London, 1974)
Courtney, Anthony, Sailor in a Russian Frame (Johnson, London, 1968)
Eden, Anthony, Full Circle (Cassell, London, 1960)
Eveland, Wilbur Crane, Ropes of Sand (W. W. Norton, New York, 1980)
Footman, David, F,ed Prelude (The Cresset Press, London, 1944)
Footman, David, The Primrose Path (The Cresset Press, London, 1946)
Footman, David, The Russian Revolution (Faber & Faber, London, 1962)
Fullick, Roy, and Powell, Geoffrey, Suez The Double War (Hamish Hamilton,
London, 1979)
Gehlen, Reinhard, The Service (World Publishing, New York, 1972)
Gibney, Frank, and Deriabin, Peter, The Penkovsky Papers (Doubleday, New
York, 1965)
Golitsyn, Anatoli, New Lies for Old (Bodley Head, London, 1984)
Hennessy, Peter, Cabinet (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986)
Howarth, Patrick, Intelligence Chief Extraordinary (Bodley Head, London, 1986)
Hutton, J. Bernard, Frogman Spy (Neville Spearman, London, 1960)
Hutton, J. Bernard, Commander Crabb is Alive (Tandem, 1968)
Johns, Philip, Within Two Cloaks (William Kimber, London, 1979)
Jones, R. V., Most Secret War (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1978)
CIR INTERNRL USE ONLY
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178 The Friends
Landau, Henry, All's Fair (Putnam, New York, 1935)
Landau, Secrets of the White Lady (Putnam, New York, 1937)
Landau, Henry, The Enemy Within (Putnam, New York, 1937)
Lockhart, John Bruce, Intelligcnce: A British View (RUSI, London, 1987)
Lonsdale, Gordon, Spy (Neville Spearman, London, 1965)
Mackenzie, Compton, Greek Memories (ed. Tom Troy) (University of America,
New York, 1987)
Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors (Harper & Row, New York, 1980)
Masterman, J. C., On the Chariot Wheel (OUP, Oxford, 1975)
McCargar, James, The Spy and his Masters (Becker & Warburg, London, 1963)
McDermott, Geoffrey, The Eden Legacy (Leslie Frewin, London, 1969)
McGovern, James, Crossbow and Overcast (William Morrow, New York, 1964)
Miller, Harry, Jungle War in Malaya (Arthur Barker, London, 1972)
Montgomery Hyde, H., The Quiet Canadian (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1962,)
Montgomery Hyde, H., George Blake: Superspy (Constable, London, 1987)
Nutting, Anthony, No End of a Lesson (Constable, London, 1967)
Philby, Kim, My Silent War (McGibbon & Kee, London, 1968)
Pugh, Marshall, Frogman (Charles Scribner, New York, 1956)
Rhodes James, Robert, Anthony Eden (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, London, 1986)
Roosevelt, Kermit, Countercoup (McGraw Hill, New York, 1979)
Seton-Watson, Hugh, The East European Revolution (London, 1950)
Seton-Watson, Hugh, The Pattern of Communist Revolution (London, 1953)
Seton-Watson, Hugh, Neither War Nor Peace (Methuen, London, 1960)
Shuckburgh, Evelyn, Descent to Suez Diaries 1951-6 (Weidenfeld &Nicolson,
London, 1986)
Sillitoe, Percy, Cloak without Dagger (Cassell, London, 1955)
Smiley, David, Albanian Assignment (Chatto &Windus, London, 1984)
Strong, Kenneth, Intelligence at the Top (Cassell, London, 1968)
Sweet-Escott, Bickham, Baker Street Irregular (Methuen, London, 1965)
Tangye, Derek T~ Way to Minack (Michael Joseph, London, 1978)
Thompson, Sir Robert, Defeating Communist Insurgency (Chatto &Windus,
London, 1967)
Tokaev, G. A, Betrayal of an Ideal (trs. Alec Brown) (Indiana University Press,
Indiana, 1955)
Tokaev, G. A., Comrade X (Harvill Press, London, 1956)
Vernier, Anthony, Through the Looking Glass (Jonathan Cape, London, 1983)
West, Nigel, A Matter of Trust: MIS 1945-72 (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, London,
1982)
West, Nigel, M16: British Seaet Intelligence Service Operations 1909-45
(Weidenfeld &Nicolson, London, 1983)
West, Nigel, Molehunt (Weidenfeld &Nicolson, London, 1987)
?
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Bib/iog~aphy ~ 79
Whitwell, John (alias Leslie Nicholson), British Agent (William Kimber, London,
1967)
Winterbotham, Fred, The Ultra Secret (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974)
Woodhouse, C. M., Something Ventured (Granada, London, 1982)
Wright, Peter, Spycatcher (Heinemann, Sydney, 1987)
Wynne, Greville, The Man from Moscow (Hutchinson, London, 1967)
Wynne, Greville, The Man from Odessa (Robert Hale, London, 1981)
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Index
?
?
A Branch, of MI5, 84
Director of, su Cumming
A2 Section, of SIS, 138
A4 Section, of SIS, 138
Abd el-Latif, Mahmoud, 100
Abdelmalik Mton Yacoub, 103, 114
Abwehr, 25, 57, 155
Aland, Sir Mtony, xvii
Admiralty, 9, 12, 82, 83
Admiralty Research Establishment, Tedding-
ton, 82
Ah Kuk, 47
Air Intelligence Section, of 515, 12
Aktunedov, Ismail, 146-7
Albania, b, 59-66
Albu, Austen, MP, 23
Allan, Colonel Arthur, 136
Allan, Gillian, 136
Allen, David, 142
AJ!'s Fair (Landau), 2
Altrincham, Lord 29
Amery, Julian, bl, 77
ANA, see Arab News Agency Limited
Mglo-Egyptian Treaty, 100
Mglo-lranian Oil Company, 87, 88, 89, 94
Mkara Station, IS
Head of, su Dennys
Arab News Agency Limited, 96, 102, 103,
II3-15
Aran, Yehuda, 38
Armitage, Sir Robert, 7I
ARNIKA, 132
Arnold-Forster, Christopher H., 12, 13
Arthur, Geoffrey, xvu
Ashbel, Michael, 31, 36
ASIS, see Australian Secret Intelligence
Service
Assistant Chief Staff Officer, su Slocum
Athens Station, 59, 63, 77, 78, 149
Head of, see Clive, Hare, Phillpotts,
Whinney
Atomic Energy Authority, 106
Security Adviser to, see Liddell
Atomic Energy Research Establishment, 105
Attiya, Samuel, 103, 114
Attlee, Clement R., MP, 5, 10, 30, 32
Attorney-General, see Hobson
Australian Secret Intelligence Service, 152,
154
Ayer, Professor A. J.. 3, 10
Azar, Samuel, 99
Bad Oeynhausen, 21
Bad Salzuflen, 21
Baghdad Pact, 77, 100
Baghdad Station, 108
Head of, su Rolo
Bajanov, Boris, 151
Balfour, Arthur, MP, 29
Balfour, David, 39
Balfour Declaration, 29, 33
Bandera, Stepan, 66, 67
Bangkok Station, 48, 49, 149
Head of, sa Hinton
Banks, Colonel Cyril, MP, 114
Barclay, Sam, bI
BCCG, sre British Control Commission for
Germany
Beale, Neville, 163, 164
Bedeir, Salah Hassan, 103, 114
Bedeir, Youssef, 103, 114
Waddington, Major-General William, 12
Bedell Smith, Walter, 93
Begin, Menachem, 31, 34, 35, 39
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Behar, George, see Blake
Beirut Station, 70, 136, 142, 166
Head of, see Elliott, Lunn, Steele
Ben-Gurion, David, 30, 109
Bennet, Max, 99
Benton, Kenneth. 33
Berlin Station, 17, 21, 80, 108, 136
Cover of, sa British Control Commission
for Germany
Head of, see Lunn. Rolo
Berne Station, 33, 116, 119, 145
Head of, see De Haan, Elliott, Vanden
Heuvel
Bent', George, 18
Bettaney, Michael, 162-4
Bevin, Ernest, MP, 5, 23, 26, 31
Blake. George, 6, 80, I33-41, 147
an est of, 136
escape of, 155-7
joins A2, 138
Seoul Station, 135, 136
Blunt, (Sir) Anthony, 56, I06, 145, 149, 154
Bokhan Sergei, I65
Bourke, Sean, 156
Boursicot, Pierre, 109
Bowlby, Cuthbert F.B., 57, I19
Boxshall, Edward, 119
Bratt?Guy, 134
Braun, Werner von, 24
Briance, John xvb 89, ibb
Bridges, Sir Edward 5, 10, 85, 116
Briggs, Sir Harold, 46
Bristow, Desmond, 3, 55
British Agent (Whitwell), 2
British Control Commission For Germany, 19-
23, 119, 17.8, 152
Intelligence Division of, 21-3, I05
British Intclligcma in the Second World War
(Eiiruley et aL), 2
British Middle East Office, 17, 70
British Security Co-ordination 16, 153, 154
Brook, Sir Norman, 85, I06
Brook, Sir Robin 10, lI9
Broomart?White, Dick 52.85
Bruce Lockhart, John xvi, 3, I8, 19, l2. 59,
69, 119
Bruce Lockhart, Sir Robert, 9
Brussels Station 134
Head of, ser Bratt, PhiUpotts
Buchazest Station, 58
Head of, see Boxshall, Doran
Buenos Aires Station, 167
Bulganin, Marshal, 82
Bundtsnachrichtenclienst, 25
Burgess, Guy, 53. 54, 106, 119, 154
Burrows, Bernard, xvii
Cabinet Secretary, see Bridges, Brook
Caccia, Sir Hazold, xvii, 15, 16
Caimcross, John C.. 147, 148
Cairo Station, 17, 70, 101, 102, I15
Covers of, see British Middle East Office,
Combined Research and Planning Office,
Inter-Services Liaison Department
Head of, see Dennys, Smith-Ross
Carew-Hunt, Robert, 10, 11
Carleton Green, Hugh, 96
Carlson, Rodney W.. 126
Carr, Hang L., 14, 25, 27, bb, 119, 161
Cartledge, Sir Bryan, 163
Casuro, 159
Cavendish, Anthony, 3, 27
Cavendish-Bentinck, Victor ('Bill'), xvii, I5, 58
Cell, Robert, I2, I42
Central Intelligence Agency, 3, 5, 21, 26, 62,
65-7, 77, 98, 99, III, 122-8, 130, 132-
5, 146, 165-8
Director of, sn Dulles, McCone
Chadwick, Major H.B., 31
Challe, General Maurice. I09
Chamberlain, Neville, MP, 29
Charles, Sir Ncel, 33
Chen Ping, 42, 48
Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, sec
Curwen Figures, Menzies, Oldfield,
Rennie, Sinclair. White
Childs, Douglas, 138
Chisholm, Janet, 124, 127, 129
Chisholr4 Roderick (Ruari'), I22, 124, 125,
129, 130, 140
Churchill, Sir Winston S., MP, I0, 29, 92, 94,
95
CIA, see Central Intelligence Agency
CIFE, sa Combined Intelligence Far East
Clive, Nigel, 3, 39, 108, 115, 119
Glutton, Sir George, xvii, 83, 90, 149
Cohen Dov, 36
Cohen, Kenneth H. S.. 13, 57, 135, 138, 150
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Collins, Major H. A., 36
Combined Intelligence Far East, 16, 43
Combined Research and Planning Office, 17
Cominform, 10
Comintern, 10
Communist Party of Great Britain, 54, 56
Controller Far East, see Ellis
Controller Middle East, see Young
Cookridge, E. H., I37
Copeland, Miles, 87
Copenhagen Station, Ibl
Head of, see Carr, Mitchell, Phillpotts
Cordeaux, Colonel John, MP, 12, 13, 85
Cornwell, David, 3
Countcr-lntelligertte Bulletin, 22
Courtney, Anthony, MP, 27
Cowell, Gervase, 125, 127
Cowell, Pamela, I27
Cowgill, Felix, I1, 53
CPGB, see Communist Party of Great Britain
Crabb, Lionel (Buster), 5, SI~i, 107, I16, 117
Crawford, Stewart, xvu
Crichton, David, IIS, 116
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 88
Crow, Sir Alwyn, 24
CRPO, see Combined Research and Planning
Office
CSS, scc Chief of the Secret Intelligence
Service
De Gaulle, General Charles, 20
De Haan, Edward, 34, I I5, 145
De Mowbray, Stephen, xvi, 116
Denne, Alurid, 13
Dennys, Rodney, 53, 101-1
Deputy Director, of SIS, 12, 59
Air, 12
Army, 12
Navy, 12
Deriabin, Peter, 126, 129
De Salis, Charles, 18, 59, 161
DGSE (French Intelligence Service), 3
DIAMOND, I33-6
Director of Central ]ntelligence, see CIA
Director of Military Intelligence, 12
Director of Naval Intelligence. 83, 138
Dixon, Dickie, 16
Dobb, Maurice, 56
Doran, Desmond, 35
Doran, Sancta, 35
Druce, Captain Harry, 139
Duff, Sir Antony, xvii, 170
Dulles, Allen, 90
Dulling, Kenneth, 138
Dunderdale, Wilfred A. ('Biffy'), 25, 151
Dwyer, Peter, xvi, 16, 53
E Division, of MI5, 16, 70
Easton, Sir James Qack), 12, 26, 83, 86,
I15,
Cumming, Lieutenant-Colonel Malcolm E. D.,
119
84
Eban, Aubrey, 37
Curry, Jack, 53.
Ebeid, Mohammed, 103, 114
Curwen, Su Christopher, xv, xvi
Eden, Sir Anthony, MP, 5, 6, 66, 79, 85-90,
Cyprus, 69-77, 90, IOI
95, 107-13, IIb-17
Emergency in, b, 69-77
Egypt, 97-I04, 108-17
Spedal Branch of, 70, 72 Eisenhower, General, I5, 90, 95
ELLI, I50
D Branch, of MI5, 152 Elliott, Nicholas J., 33, 56, 82, 83, 85, 136,
Daily Fspress, 86
Dailey, Colonel John, 42-3
Derbyshire, Norman, 89, 90, 94, 95, I15, 148
Davies, (Lord) Edmund 114
Davies, Ted, 80, 82, 84
Davis, John, 48
Davison, Alexis, 125, 126
Dayan, Moshe, 30, 108, I09
Dean, Sir Patrick, xvu, b, 91, 107-10, 113, 116
Defence Security Officer, 17, 70, 101
De Garston, Lance, 34
I42, I44, ISI
Ellis, C H. (Dick), 17, 49, 118, I52-5
EMERTON, see Ellis
EOKA, 7I-7
Epstein, Israel, 35
Ewan-Biggs, Christopher, xvii
Falklands campaign, 5, 170
Fanner, John, 115, 116
Farouk, King, of Egypt, 97, 98, 99
Ferran, Roy, 37
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Fergusson, General Sir Bernard, 32, 37, 96
Figures, Colin, xv, 163
Firth, Maurice, 108
Fletcher, Fitz, 70
Flower, Ken, 167
FLUENCY Committee, 152, 155
Flux, John, 104
Folks, Peter, bb
Foot, Sir Hugh, 74
Footman, David, 10, 12, 118
Force 136, ses Special Operations Executive
Foreign Office Adviser, xvii, b, 83, 86, 90, 149
Forcer, Alexis, 89, 116
Franks, Sir Dickie, xv, 10, 90, 115, II9, 168
Franks, Lord, 5
Franks Report, 5, 170
Fuchs, Klaus, 55, 105, 106
Fulton, James, 22, 49, lI9
Gaitskell, Hugh, MP, 85. 95
Gale, Louis, 136
Galienne, Simon, i3
Gazier, Albert, 109
GCHQ see Government Communications
Headquarter
Gee, Ethel, 129
Gehlen, General Reinhard, 25, 26
Gheja, Igor, 165
Gibiy, Benjamin, 100
Gibney, Frank 129
Gibson, Archie, 58, 151
Gibson, Harold C L., 18, 25, 27, 33, 58, 83,
146, 148, 151, 152
Gleadell, Colonel Paul, 43
Glover, Sir Gerald, 2
Glubb, General Sir John, 102, 107
Goleniewski, Michal, 234-5, 150
Golitsyn, Anatoli, S I, 118, 143, 149, 151
Gordievsky, Oleg, b, 161-5
Gook, Arkadi, 162-3
Gouzenko, Igor, 150
Gove, J.G., 104, 114
Government Communications Headquarter,
9, 38, 102, 113, 148, 167, 169
Director of, ser Hastings, Hooper
Graham, Bill, 4
Gray, Colonel Nicol, 42, 45
Gnek Memories (Mackenzie), 2
Greene, Graham, 3
Greenhill, Denis, xvii
Gregorovitch, Colonel Milovan, 104,113, l I4
Grimshaw, Colonel, 79
Grivas, Colonel George. 69, 72, 73-4, 75, 76
GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), 21, 113,
131, 146, 150. 156, 165
Gruver, Dov, 36
Gubbins, Major-General Sir Colin, 9, 58
Gurney, Sir Henry, 42, 45
Haganah, 30-35, 37, 38, 39
Hambro, Sir Charles, 23
Hamdi, Mohammed. 102
Hanna, Youssef Megali, 103, 114
Harding, Sir John, 72
Hare, Alan, 60, 61, 62, 78, 96
Hanel, Isser, 31
Harker, Brigadier Jasper, 18
Hartison, John, 16
Harvey, Bill, 79-80
Harvey-Jones, Sir John. 27
Hastings, Captain Edward, 12
Hastings, Sir Stephen. MP, 75
Hayter, Sir William, xvii, bI
Heakes, D.A.G., 22
Helsinki Station, 75
Head of, sa Hastings
Hennessy, Peter, 5
Henry, John, 82, 84
Hibberdine, John, 60
Hinsley, Su Hany, 2, 3
Hinton, Geoffrey, 102, 149
Hobson. Sir John, 144
Hollis. Sir Roger, 105, 244
Hong Kong Station, 129
Head of, sa King
Hood William. 140
Hooper, Sir Leonard, 169
Hoops, Sir Robin, xvd
Hope, Sir Peter, l8
Hopkinson, Henry, MP, 70
Houghton, Harry, 129, I33
Hoxha, Enver, b, 60
Hutton, J. Bernard 86
Hyde, H. Montgomery, 68, 156
Indian Central Intelligence Bureau, 43
lnformaHon Research Department, I0, 95-6
Inglis, Sir John, 83
i
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/nsidc Intelligence (Cavendish), 3
Intelligence Co-ordinator to the Cabinet, 165,
170
sec Hooper, Richards, White
Intelligence Division, of BCCG, 2I-3, I05
Inter-Services Liaison Department, 17, 35, I04
Irgun Zvai Leumi, 30, 36, 38
ISLD, see Inter-Services Liaison Department
Israel, 99, I08-I1, II3
set also Palestine
Istanbul Station, 53, 146
Head of, set Machray, Philby
Jacob, Richard C, I26
Jeffes, Maurice, Ili, l I8
Jenkin, Sir William, 43
Jerusalem Station, 39
Head of, see Clive
Jewish Agency, 30, 38
JIB, sa Joint Intelligence Bureau
John, Otto, 26
Johns, Philip, 3
Joint Intelligence Bureau, IS
Director of, sce Strong
Joint Intelligence Committee, 5, 6, 49, 58, 107,
I13
Assessments Staff of, 5
Chairman of, xvii, 15, II6, 169, I70
Latin America Group, 5
Jones, Professor R.V., 3
K Branch, of MI5, I62
Karamanlis, Constantine, 73, 77
Karaolis, Michael, 72
Keble, Brigadier C M., 59
Kellar, Alex, I7
Kemp, Peter, 6I
Kerby, Captain Heny, MP, 85
KGB, Soviet State Security, 3, 67, 12i-4,
126-8, 130-36, 143, 147-S I, 155-7,
16I-5
Khalil, Assam el-Din Mahmoud I I4-15
Khayri, Hussein, I15
Khokhlov, Nikolai, 67
Khrushchev, Nikita, b, 82, 113, Iii, 132
Kimche, Israel, 36
King, C Andrew B., I4, 54, I28, 129, 150-51
King David Hotel, 35
Kirby Green, Philip, I7, 75
Kirkpatrick, Ivone, I08, IIb
Kisevalter, George, 124, 13I
Klose, Admiral Hans-Helmut, 27, 66
Koch de Gooreynd, Peter, 12
Kohlmann, Litzi, 52
Kondrashev, Sergei, 140
Krivitsky, Walter, 150, 152
Kroger, Helen, I29, 133
Kroger, Peter, 129, I33
Kuzichkin, Vladimir, 164
Kuznov, Sergei, 130
Labour Party, 23, 97, I16
Lai Teck 42
Landau, Henry, 2
Langton, Major T.M., 153
Lasalle, Ferdinand, I1
Leatham, John, 61
Lecky, Terence, 136, I52, I56
Legh, Diana, 138
Lethbridge, Brigadier John, 2I
Liddell, Guy, 105, 106
Lisbon Station, 3
Head of, sa Johns
Uoyd, Selwyn, 76, 103, 109, 113
Logan, Sir Donald, 109, 110
Loizides, Sokratis, 70
London Station, 82, 83, 159
Head of, see Flliott
Long, Leo, 23
Lonsdale, Gordon, 128, I32, I33
Lunn, Peter, 14, 79, 136, I42
Lyalin, Oleg, I60, 161
. Lyngbo, Michael, 162
Lyttelton, Oliver, MP, 45, 70
Macdermot, Niall, Z2
MacDonald, Alec, 47
MacDonald, Malcolm, 17
MacGillivray, Sir Donald, 48
MacGlashan, John, 113, II4
MacGregor, Alistair, 37
Machray, Cyril, 53, 59
Mackenzie, Sir Compton 2
Maclean, Donald, 53, 54, II9, 154
Macmillan, Harold IIb, 118
Madoc, Guy, 47
Madrid Station, 53, 55
Head of, sa Bristow
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Magan, Bill, 17, 75
Mahmoud, Captain Ahmed Amin, 103, 114
Mahmoud, Sayed Amin, 103, 114
Makarios, Archbishop, 69, 72-6
Makin, Captain, I39
Malaya, 41-50
Emergency in, 45-50
Spedal Branch. 42-50
Security Service, 42, 43
Malay Communist Party, 41-4, 46-9
Head of, sa Lai Teck, Chen Ping
Maly, Theodore, 56
Martin, Arthur S.. 47, 152
Martin, Clifford 36
Marzouk, Dr Moshe, 99
Masterman, Sir John C, 2
Maturin, Adelaide, 96
Maugham, Somerset, 3
Mau-Mau rebels, 75, 96
Mayhew, Christopher, 95, 96
McCargar, James, 62
McCaul, Michael, xvi
Mc{one, John, 166
McDermott, Geoffrey, xvii, 9, 107, 108, 116,
139--40
McMillan, General, 36
Meikle, George, 70, 72
Menzies, Major-General Sir Stewart, xv, 9, 31,
55, 58, 67-8, 117
MI5, sa Security Service
MI6, sa Seaet Intelligence Service
Mikhail, Massif Morkos, 103, I14
Mikoyan, Anastas, 58
Miltno, Sir Helenus, 55
Milne, LL ('I"un), 53, 57, I45
Ministry of Economic Warfare, 9. 26
Min Yuen, 46
Mitchell, Leslie, xv4 Ib, II9, I61
Modin, Yuri, 145
Monet. Guy, 109
Molody, Konon, sa Lonsdale
Montevideo Shtion, 152
Head of sa De Mowbray
Montgomery, Field Marshal, 21
Montgomery, Hugh, I25
Morton, Jack, Z, 17, 43, 44
Moscow Station, 18, I21, 122, I56
Head of, see Chisholm, Cowell
Mossad. 31, 39
Moyne, Lord, 30
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 3
Mukhabarat, 99, 103, 114
Munn, Colonel John, 13, 53
Murphy, David, 140
Muslim Brotherhood, 98
Mussadeq, Dr, 3, b, 88, 89, 90-95
Nasser, Colonel, 70, 99, 100, 102, 109, 111,
114-IS
Nassiry, Colonel Nematollah, 92, 93
Nathanson, Philip, 99
NATO, 80, I00
Neave, Airey, MP, 169
Neguib, General Mohammed, 98, 99
Newman, Anthony, 63
Nicholson, Leslie, l
NKVD, 21, 24, 56, 58, 120
Northern Ireland, 158-60
Northern Ireland Office, 169
Northrop, Anthony, 60
Nosenko, Yuri, 130
Nutting, Sir Anthony, 100, 107, I09
Oakley-Hill, Dayrell, 63
Office of Policy Co-ordination, 62
Official $eorets Act, 2, 4, 143
Okolovick, Georgi, 67
Oldfield, Sir Maurice, xv, xvi, 17, 44, 49, 150,
165-70
appointed CSS, I65
Washington Station, i27, 166
Oman. 5, I67
Operation BACKFIRE, 24
Operation BOOT, 90-93, 149
Operation BROADSIDE, 35
Operation BUCCANEER 88
Operation HAMILCAR I04, 110
Operation LORD, 79
Operation MUSKETEER 111-13
Operation PEPPERPOT, 73
Operation POLLY, 36, 39
Operation PRINCE, 79-80, 132. I40, 260
Operation STRAGGLE, 97, 103, 104, 107,
I20
Operation SUNSHINE, 75, 76
Operation VALUABLE, 51, 60-66
OrdzlwnildAre, b, 82, 86
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Index
Magan, Bill, 17, 75
Moyne, Lord, 30
Mahmoud, Captain Ahmed Amin, 103,
114
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 3
Mahmoud, Sayed Amin, 103, 114
Mukhabarat, 99, 103, 114
Makarios, Archbishop, 69, 72~i
Munn, Colonel John, 13, 53
Makin, Captain, 139
Murphy, David, 140
Malaya, 41-50
Muslim Brotherhood, 98
Emergency in. 45-50
Mussadeq, Dr, 3, 6, 88, 89, 90-95
Special Branch, 4Z-50
Security Service, 4Z, 43
Malay Communist Party, 41-4, 46-9
Nasser, Colonel, 70, 99, 100, IOZ, 109, 111,
114-IS
Head of, sre Lai Teck, Chen Ping
Maly, Theodore, 56
Martin, Arthur S., 47, I52
Nassiry, Colonel Nematollah, 9Z, 93
Nathanson, Phi4p, 99
NATO
80
100
Martin, Clifford, 36
Marzouk, Dr Moshe, 99
Mastennan, Sir John C., Z
Maturin, Adelaide, 96
Maugham, Somerset, 3
Mau-Mau rebels, 75, 96
Mayhew, Christopher, 95, 96
McCargar, James, 6Z
McCaul, Michael, xvi
,
,
Neave, Airey, MP, 169
Neguib, General Mohammed, 98, 99
Newman, Anthony, 63
Nicholson, Leslie, Z
NKVD, Zl, 24, 56, 58, IZO
Northern Ireland, ISS~i0
Northern Ireland Office, 169
Northrop, Anthony, 60
McCone, John, 166
Nosenko, Yuri, 130
McDermott, Geoffrey, xvii, 9, 107, I08,
116
Nutting, Sir Anthony, 100, 107, 109
,
139-40
McMillan, General, 36
Oakley-Hill, Dayrell, 63
Meikle, George, 70, 7Z
Office of Policy Co-ordination, 6Z
Menzies, Major-General Sir Stewart, xv,
9, 3I
, Offidal Seaets Ad, 2, 4, 143
55, 58, 67-8, II7
Okolovick, Georgi, 67
MI5, see Security Service
Oldfield, Sir Maurice, xv, xvi, I7, 44, 49, 150,
MI6, see Secret Intelligence Service
165-70
Mikhail, Massif Morkos, 103, II4
appointed CSS, I65
Mikoyan; Anastas, 58
Washington Station, 1Z7, 166
Milmo, Sir Helenus, 55
Oman, 5, 167
Milne, L I. (Tim), 53, 57, 245
Operation BACKFIRE, 24
Ministry of Economic Warfare, 9, Zb
Operation BOOT, 90-93, 149
Min Yuen, 46
Operation BROADSIDE, 35
Mitchell, Leslie, xvi, Ib, II9, IbI
Operation BUCCANEER 88
Modin, Yuri, 145
Operation HAMILCAR 104, IIO
Moller, Guy, 109
Operation LORD, 79
Molady, Konon, see Lonsdale
Operation MUSKETEER Iii-13
Montevideo Station, 252
Operation PEPPERPOT, 73
Head of, ses De Mowbray
Operation POLLY, 36, 39
Montgomery, Field Marshal, ZI
Operation PRINCE, 79-80, I3Z, 140, 160
Montgomery, Hugh, IZS
Operation STRAGGLE, 97, 103, 104, 107,
Morton, Jack, Z, I7, 43, 44
IZO
Moscow Station, I8, IZ1, 1ZZ, I56
Operation SUNSHINE, 75, 76
Head of, see Chisholm, Cowell
Operation VALUABLE, 51, 606
Mossad 3I, 39
O-dzhonikidts, b, 8Z, 86
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RUPEE, 131, 132
Russell Jones, Barry, xvi
$adat, Anwar, 99, IOI
St John, Oliver, 114
Sandstrom, Emil, 37
Savage, Gerald, 70, IOI, 111
SDECE (French Intelligence Service), lOZ,
109, 110
Head of, sec Boursicot
Secret Intelligence Service, 1-18, 21-7, 31,
33-5, 38-40, 43, 49ff
Chief of, see Curwen, Figures, Menzies, Old-
Reld Rennie, Sindair, White
Security and Counter-Intelligence (Hinsley), Z
SekUVrity Commission, 163, 164
Security Intelligence Middle East, 17, 31, 36,
IOI, 124, 166
Head of, sa Oughton, Roberts
Security Liaison Officer, 43, 47, 70
Security Service, Z, 9, I0, 47, 56, 67, 84, 145,
148-50, 15Z, 155, 16Z
Overseas Branch of, 17, 41, 43, 70, 75, 101,
204-6, 107, 167
Selbome, Lord 9
Seoul Station, 135
Head of, stt Blake
Serov, Ivan, 2I
Serpell, Michael, 105
Setchell, Herbert, 153
Seton-Watson, Hugh, 10, 11, 23
Seymour, Charles, 138
Shah, Reza, of Iran, 87, 88, 89, 9i-4
Shanghai Station, 53
Head of, ser Steptoe
Shepilov, Dmitri, 101
Shergold Harold 17, 21, IZ4, 129, 234, 236
Sherut Yediot (Sheri), 30
Shipp, Cekil, xvi
Shudcbkugh, Su Evelyn, 126
SIFAR (Italian Intelligence Service), 110
Silbert, General Edwin, 25
Sillitoe, Sic Percy, Z. 105, 106
Silverwood-Cope, Machlacilan, xvi. II9, I61
Simchon, Joseph, 3i
SIME, see Sekuvrity Intelligence Middle East
Simkins, Anthony, Z
Simmonds, John, ZZ-3
Sindair, Admiral Sir Hugh, 77
Sincair, Sir John, xv, IZ, 55, 59, 85-6
Singapore Station, Ib, 17, 43, 49, 125
Head of, see Fulton, Oldfield
SIS, see Secret Intelligence Service
Skardon, William (Jim), 55
Skripkin, Lieutenant, 121, 150
SLO, sa Security Liaison Officer
Slocum, Commander Frank, 13, 80, 81, 119,
149
Smellie, Craig, 116, 152, 158
Smiley, David, 60, 63, 64
Smith, Ferguson 136
Smith-Ross, Teddy, IOI
SNIPER, sa Goleniewski
SOE, see Special Operations Executive
Solomon, Flora, 143
Soviet espionage, see KGB, GRU
Spedal Air Service Regiment, 37, 167
Special Liaison Centre, 25
Speaal Operations Executive, b, 23, 30, 31,
52, 58-61, IZO
Balkans Section, 59
Force 126, 59
Force. 133, 59
Force 136, 4i, 43, 48
Force Zbb, 59
German Section of, 21
Head of, sa Gubbins, Hambro
Polish Section of, 33
Stallwood Frank, 63
Stanley, John, II3, II4
Stashinsky, Bogdan, 67
Stayer, Major Robert, 24
Steele, Frank, 136, 15i
Stephenson, Sir William, 16, 153
Steptoe, Harry, 53
Stem, Avraham, 30
Stem Gang, 30, 34
Stemdale Bennett, Sir John, 7i
Steveni, Major, ISI
Stevenson, Hugh, xvii
Stewart, Sir Findlater, 10
Stockholm Station, II9, 151
Head of, see Bnrce Lockhart, Silverwood-
Cope
Stone, Harry, xvi
Strangeways, David 2Z
Strong, Major-General Kenneth I5, 26
Suez Canal zone, 97-8, 100, 102, 110-13
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Sulakov, Roman, 59, I51
Svadlov, 8I, 82, 84
Sweet, George, 113
Sweet-Escott, Bickham, 33
Swinbum, James, 103, I04, I I3, 114
Tangye, Derek. 2
Tank, Professor Kurt, 24
Tascev, Colonel J. D., 25, 120
Tchilcov, Anatoli, I11
Teague, Colonel John, 16, 17, 70, 101, lI9
Tehran Station, 3, 89, 116, 148
Head of, sa Franks, Steptce, Woodhouse
Tel Aviv Station, 35, 39, 70, 130
Head of, see Balfour, Doran
Templer, Sir Gerald, 2I, 4I, 45, 46, 48
Teplyakova, Irma, 160
Thatcher, Margaret, MP, 169
Thistlethwaite, Dick, xvi, 16
Thompson, Sir Robert, 44
Tokaev, Colonel Grigori, 24, 25, 120, ISI
Trevor Roper, Hugh, 3
Tokyo Station, 119, 121
Head of, sa Silverwood-Eope
Truman, President, 35, 38
Tufnell, Commander Michael, I2I
U-2, III, 112, 125
UB, sa Urzsrd Bapieczsnshoa
Ukraine, 27, 66-7
Ulmer, Al, 77, 125
LWra Barret, The (Winterbotham), 3
United Nations, 37
Urirrd Bezpiazenstroa (Polish intelligence
Bureau), 134
Ustinov, Klop, I05
Van Vleit. Oliver, 122
Vanden HeuveL Frederick, 33, 34, 153
Varentsov, Marshal, 125
Varley, Lieutermnt-Commander John, i27
Verscroyle, Derek, 33-4
Vienna Station, 22, I29
Head of, sa King, Rolo
Vivian, Valentine, 54, 57, I18
Index ~ gg
VOLKAN, 74
Volkov, Konstantin, I20-21, 144, 146, I50
War Planning Branch, of SIS, 59
Watts, Stephen, 2
Way, Keith, 47
Welsh, Eric, 23
Whinney, Pat, bI, 63
White, Sir Dick G., xv, 22, 44, 55, 86, 104-7,
1I5, 1I7, 118, I42, 169
Whittall, Jack, I46
Whitwell, John, see Leslie Nicholson
Wilkinson, Peter, xvii
Williams, General Bill, 2I
Williams, Francis, 83
Williams, Sir Michael, xvii, b, 83, 86, I Ib, I49
Windham, Mr Justice, 36
Winterbom, Hugh, 84
Winterbotham, F. W., 3
Wisner, Frank, 6I, 62, 63
Woodhouse, The Hon. C. M., 3, 59, 63, 88,
89, 90, 93-4, 95, I48
Wright, Patrick, xvii
Wright, Peter, 2, 4, 75, I55
Wyke, John, 75, 79
Wylie, Ian, 42
Wyman, John, I59
Wynne, Greville, IIB, 123-31
Young, Sir Arthur, 45
Young, Courtney, 16
Young, George K, 22, 70, 90, I08, IIS, 119
Young, Rollo, 62
Ysemitkry, Yitzhak, 35
Yurchenko, Vitali, I65
Zaehner, Professor Robert, 60, 63, 89, 90, 148
Zahedi, General Fazlollah, 9i, 92, 93, 100
Zarb, James, I03, 104, 1I3, 114
Zelensky, Alexander, 153
Zhdanov, Andrei A., 41
Zhelyabov, Andrei, I1
Zilliacus, Konni, MP, 23, 85
Zog, King, of Albania, 65
Zu Putlitz, Wolfgang, 105, I06
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