The Defence of the Realm (105 page)

The first major success of the Security Service campaign to ‘educate' Whitehall on the threat of Soviet espionage was the decision by the Wilson government in November 1968, three months after the crushing of the Prague Spring by the forces of the Warsaw Pact, to allow no further increase in the size of the Soviet embassy. The KGB and GRU, however, managed to circumvent this ceiling by sending more ‘working wives' to the embassy and stationing more intelligence officers in other Soviet offices in London, in particular the Trade Delegation. Service attempts to limit the growth of the Trade Delegation ran into ‘considerable opposition' from both the Department of Trade and Industry and the British embassy in Moscow.
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The Conservative victory at the June 1970 general election greatly assisted the Security Service campaign. The incoming Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and his Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, were convinced that the size of the Soviet intelligence presence in London had become ‘a real threat to our national security'. For some months Douglas-Home hoped to resolve the problem by private negotiation. But when he raised the issue with his Soviet opposite number, Andrei Gromyko, in the autumn, Gromyko gave the absurd reply: ‘These figures you give cannot be true because the Soviet Union has no spies.' In December Douglas-Home wrote to Gromyko formally requesting a curb in ‘the scale and nature of the intelligence activities conducted by Soviet officials in this country'. He received no response.
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Within the Foreign Office, the strongest support for the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers came from George Walden, who became Soviet desk officer shortly after the election. Walden was convinced that Moscow would not take British diplomacy seriously until the British government summoned up the nerve to deal with its bloated espionage network in London:

The Russians knew that we were swamped with spies and that we didn't dare to do anything about it. The will to resist their pressures in the field of espionage was rightly seen by the Russians as a gauge of the country's resolution overall, and by 1970 the KGB regarded the British as broken-backed.
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By the spring of 1971, most if not all FCO under secretaries and heads of department had been won over to the Security Service proposal for a mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers if, as seemed increasingly likely, private persuasion failed.

The KGB attempted to discredit one of the few public figures to campaign
publicly for a reduction in the Soviet intelligence establishment in London, the former Tory MP Commander Anthony Courtney, by circulating photographs of his seduction by an Intourist guide in a Moscow hotel room fitted with a concealed KGB camera. The operation, codenamed PROBA,
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merely increased support for Courtney's campaign among Conservative backbenchers. The minister in Edward Heath's government whom the Service found hardest to win over was the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, to whom it reported. Like the previous Wilson government, Maudling initially took the view that a public protest over Soviet espionage would simply prejudice more important issues in East–West relations: ‘After a mass expulsion the government would be the laughing stock of the British public and we should all look very foolish.'
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The Home Secretary, however, was eventually convinced by the Security Service case. FJ noted, after meeting him on 24 May 1971, that Maudling ‘was surprised that we were able to identify so many Russian IOs so positively' and ‘much struck by the size of the effort needed to follow an IO'.
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In a joint memo to the Prime Minister on 30 July, Maudling and Home argued that the numbers of KGB and GRU officers were ‘more than the Security Service can be expected to contain'.
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Based on the Service's estimate of 130 Soviet intelligence officers in London, the FCO agreed on a target of a hundred expulsions.
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On 4 August Douglas-Home sent Gromyko what amounted to a final warning that the ‘inadmissible Soviet activities' in Britain which had continued unabated since his previous letter to him eight months earlier must cease. Once again, Gromyko did not reply.
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The defection of Oleg Lyalin from the KGB London residency on 3 September provided what the Service regarded as ‘a convenient additional justification' for the mass expulsion of Soviet intelligence officers.
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On 21 April 1971 Lyalin had walked into Hampstead police station, claiming to be a member of the Russian Trade Delegation. He asked to see Special Branch officers, identified himself to them as a Soviet intelligence officer and said he had important information to reveal. He was subsequently debriefed in a safe flat by Security Service officers during the first of many meetings which continued until his defection.
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Lyalin disclosed that he was the senior representative in the London residency of Department V, the section of KGB foreign intelligence specializing in sabotage and covert attack ‘in periods of crisis or war':
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It was his task to select and report on sites to be used for the infiltration by air and sea of Soviet sabotage groups and to build up a locally recruited support organisation. In 1971 he completed a comprehensive plan for the seaborne landing of a sabotage group (or groups) at Hayburn Wyke on the north Yorkshire coast. At the same time he was giving consideration to the selection of a dropping zone for an airborne landing north of the Caledonian Canal. Using locally domiciled agents recommended by his Department V predecessors, Aleksandr Savin and Vladislav Savin, he built up a network (including a Moscow trained radio agent) to support the arrival and operations of the sabotage groups to be infiltrated through Hayburn Wyke. He had the formation of a second support network in mind.
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Map provided by Oleg Lyalin after his defection, showing plans for the seaborne landing of a sabotage group (or groups) at Hayburn Wyke on the north Yorkshire coast.

Lyalin revealed that the primary purpose of the planned sabotage operations was to demoralize and terrorize the civilian population. By sabotaging railways, for example, Department V believed it could ‘make people too afraid to travel on them, thereby paralysing the economic life of the community'.
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Lyalin told his Security Service debriefers that by the time he arrived in London he was already disillusioned with Department V and despised his fellow Line F officers (as the Department's officers were known when stationed in residencies) for their fraudulent expense claims. He also wrongly believed that his cover had been blown when on arrival in London as, ostensibly, a knitwear representative in the Soviet Trade Delegation, he was met by his Line F colleague Vladislav Savin, whom he assumed had been identified by the British authorities. He told his debriefers that thereafter he fully expected to be contacted by the Security Service. In September 1970 Kentish Town police station attempted to contact Lyalin at the Trade Delegation, but only to verify his address in connection with a minor incident which had occurred some weeks earlier. Lyalin was out but called at the police station to confirm his address. He later rang 999 from a telephone booth in Highgate and, with the intention of offering information, said he wanted to get in touch with anyone who knew anything about the Soviet Union. The operator misunderstood the purpose of the request and offered to give him the number of the Soviet embassy. Lyalin rang off.
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During meetings in a Security Service safe flat which began on 21 April 1971 and continued for over four months, Lyalin's attitude was assessed as ‘always friendly but never relaxed', frank and responsive to all the questions put to him with no intelligence topic off limits. He usually drank beer at a ‘steady rate' during the meetings but did not become visibly drunk (as he regularly did after his defection). The debriefing sessions were recorded with a tape recorder which Lyalin saw being switched on and off. What he did not realize, however, was that a second, hidden tape recorder kept recording even when the other was switched off. Lyalin's debriefers initially found it difficult to understand his motives. Though he accepted £10 or £15 at each meeting, he showed no interest in larger sums, and took considerable personal risks to stay in contact with his debriefers. Lyalin's complicated private life added to the problems of dealing with him. He revealed in his first debriefing that he planned to leave his wife and marry his Russian lover. In May, after a heated argument, his wife was observed by A4 standing in front of Lyalin's car to try to stop him driving away. Lyalin was summoned by the head of security in the London
residency to discuss this episode and the scandal likely to result from his divorce. Lyalin appealed to the Security Service to arrange for his expulsion from Britain so that he could return to Moscow and try to ensure that divorce did not damage his career. He refused to defect to Britain but declared himself anxious to work in Russia as a British agent inside the KGB.
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The Service, however, believed Lyalin to be too unpredictable to be run for long in Moscow.
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To revive his flagging career as a KGB officer, the Service devised a scheme for him to recruit a bogus agent in the MoD, codenamed AFT, with access to classified information.
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The complications in Lyalin's private life continued to increase, as he conducted a simultaneous affair with a married English woman, as well as with his Russian lover. On 27 August he had a ‘particularly frank session' with his case officers about the three women in his life, revealing that his Russian lover had hinted she was willing to live with him in Britain. Lyalin, however, said he was still determined to return to the Soviet Union. A few days later he changed his mind. In the early hours of 30 August, Lyalin was arrested for drunken driving in Tottenham Court Road, spent the night in a police cell after refusing to give a blood or urine sample, and was remanded on bail next morning at Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court. At a meeting with his handlers in the safe flat on 1 September, Lyalin seemed unconcerned about his arrest, which the residency had reported to the Centre as a provocation stage-managed by the British authorities. But he was worried by a letter from a KGB colleague in Moscow saying that his estranged wife was claiming that Lyalin was disaffected with the KGB and that he would be in serious trouble if she told the authorities. Unhappily for Lyalin, the letter had been delivered in error to a colleague in the London residency who had passed it to the security officer. Two days later, having been ordered back to Moscow, Lyalin decided to defect. At 9.50 a.m. on 3 September Lyalin rang his English lover but failed to persuade her to leave her husband and move in with him. He then phoned his Russian lover, who agreed. At 2.15 p.m. Lyalin contacted the Security Service, saying that he wished to defect, together with a friend. After removing classified documents from a KGB safe in the residency, he and his Russian lover arrived at the safe flat and signed applications for political asylum.
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As well as revealing details of Department V's sabotage plans in Britain, Lyalin provided a powerful insight into the success of the KGB London residency in detecting A4 mobile surveillance. In 1967 Lyalin's predececessor, Aleksandr Savin, had recruited as an agent a disaffected clerk in the Greater London Council (GLC) motor licensing department, Siroj
Hussein Hassanally Abdoolcader. Born into a well-to-do Malaysian family, Abdoolcader had arrived in London ten years earlier to study at Lincoln's Inn. As a result of his repeated failure to pass his law exams and dissatisfaction with his social life, he became – according to a later Service assessment – steadily ‘more bitter and resentful'. In 1967 Savin struck up an apparently chance conversation with Abdoolcader in a pub, introducing himself as a Pole named ‘Vlad' who had lived in England for many years. After further convivial pub evenings, with ‘Vlad' buying most of the drinks, he revealed himself as a Russian and persuaded Abdoolcader to look up for him in GLC records the owners of a series of cars whose registration numbers he supplied. Among them were a number which belonged to A4 and the MPSB, which KGB officers were henceforth able to identify. When Savin was recalled to Moscow in July 1969, he handed Abdoolcader over to Lyalin, whom he introduced as ‘Alex'. Lyalin began to use Abdoolcader as a talent spotter, trained him in the use of dead letter-boxes and gave him presents and regular payments (mostly small, though one was £100). A fortnight after Lyalin's defection, Abdoolcader was arrested with, in his possession, a postcard addressed to Lyalin and further details of A4 surveillance vehicles. He was later sentenced to three years' imprisonment.
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Despite the London residency's success in identifying A4 mobile surveillance, however, Lyalin had apparently reassuring news about its lack of success in penetrating the Security Service. Discussions with the KGB resident, Yuri Nikolayevich Voronin, and other residency officers convinced him that there had been no Soviet penetration of the British intelligence community since the Douglas Britten case in 1968.
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K7, which was responsible for investigating Soviet penetration, urged caution. It noted that Lyalin knew little about either past penetrations or the structure of the British intelligence community. If there were a current penetration, he ‘would hardly be on the indoctrination list'. It was none the less ironic that, at a time when Peter Wright and other conspiracy theorists were pursuing their hunt for imaginary KGB moles within the Security Service, Lyalin should be insisting that penetration of the Service was regarded by the Centre as ‘virtually impossible'.
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