The Defence of the Realm (131 page)

In 1980 evidence from an StB defector codenamed AFFIRM persuaded both the Security Service and the Thatcher government that Stonehouse had been a Czech agent. Since, however, it was decided that the defector's evidence could not be used in court, Mrs Thatcher agreed that Stonehouse should not be prosecuted.
¹⁰
AFFIRM's evidence was largely corroborated a quarter of a century later when some of the contents of Stonehouse's lengthy StB file were revealed in the Czech Republic. As AFFIRM had claimed,
¹¹
his original codename had been KOLON (‘Colonist', a reference to two years he had spent in Uganda). Stonehouse had been recruited while an Opposition backbencher to provide ‘information from Parliament and Parliamentary committees', using the money he received to fund his social life. The StB, however, were disappointed by the amount of intelligence Stonehouse provided once he became a minister.
¹²

Counter-espionage in the Thatcher era was distinguished by closer collaboration with SIS than ever before. K3, the section which recruited and ran Soviet agents, was staffed by both male and female agent-runners from both Services. The KGB London residency had no experience of being targeted by front-line female intelligence officers and seems to have taken several years to realize this was happening. K3 operations enabled both Services to learn from and about each other. According to Stella Rimington: ‘We learned from MI6 the skills of agent-running and agent recruitment, in which they then had more experience than we did. They learned from us how to behave when they were up against a sophisticated security service of – great value when working undercover in a foreign posting.'
¹³
A case which strikingly exemplified MI5–SIS collaboration was that of the most important British agent of the later Cold War, Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer recruited by SIS in 1974. To the delight of the minority of indoctrinated members in K Branch as well as SIS, in January 1982 the FCO received a visa application from the Soviet embassy on behalf of Gordievsky following his appointment as counsellor (in reality as a senior KGB political intelligence officer) in London.
¹⁴
Soon after his arrival in London on 28 June 1982, Oleg Gordievsky renewed contact with SIS.

The KGB documents which he smuggled out of the residency to meetings with his case officer stunned the small circle of intelligence officers who had access to them. They revealed that for the past year, jointly with the GRU, the KGB had been engaged in the largest peacetime operation in its history. In a secret speech to a major KGB conference in May 1981, the visibly ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev denounced the policies of the US President Ronald Reagan, who had taken office at the beginning of the year, as a serious threat to world peace. He was followed by the long-serving Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who was to succeed him as Soviet leader eighteen months later. To the astonishment of most of the audience, Andropov announced that, by decision of the Politburo, for the first time in their history the KGB and GRU were to collaborate in a global operation codenamed RYAN (a newly devised acronym for
Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie
, ‘Nuclear Missile Attack'). Its purpose was to collect intelligence on the plans by the United States and NATO for a surprise nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. In reality, no such plans existed. RYAN derived from the paranoid tendencies of the Soviet and KGB leadership at a tense period in the Cold War, fuelled by the anti-Soviet rhetoric of President Ronald Reagan, who had denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire'. Gordievsky reported that his colleagues in the Line PR (political intelligence) in London were considerably less alarmist than the Centre about the threat of nuclear war and viewed Operation RYAN with some scepticism. None, however, was willing to put his career at risk by challenging the Centre's assessment of the aggressive designs of the Reagan administration and its NATO allies. RYAN thus created a vicious circle of intelligence collection and assessment. Residencies felt, in effect, obliged to report alarming information even if they themselves were sceptical of it. The Centre was duly alarmed by what they reported and demanded more.
¹⁵
Gordievsky's intelligence had a considerable impact on Margaret Thatcher, who was indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case on 23 December 1982.
¹⁶
Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was also informed about the case on becoming foreign secretary six months later, recalls:

One powerful impression quite quickly built up in my mind: the Soviet leadership really did believe the bulk of their own propaganda. They did have a genuine fear that ‘the West' was plotting their overthrow – and might, just might, go to any lengths to achieve it. This near obsession, it became clear, was fuelled by the rhetoric (and sometimes more than rhetoric) which accompanied . . . the more or less simultaneous arrival in power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
¹⁷

The only other cabinet minister indoctrinated into the Gordievsky case (on
24 January 1983) was the Home Secretary.
¹⁸
With one extraordinary exception which comes close to second sight, there is no known case of a Security Service officer not indoctrinated into the case who suspected that Oleg Gordievsky was a British agent. The exception was an officer involved in identifying Soviet intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover, who was indoctrinated on 15 March 1983 to help monitor Gordievsky's security and provide other forms of support. She explained to the colleague who had indoctrinated her that a few nights earlier she had dreamed that she was walking along a corridor in the Service's Gower Street headquarters and went into a small office directly ahead of her. ‘There, sitting at the desk, was Gordievsky.'
¹⁹

Though Gordievsky was run by SIS rather than by the K3 joint section, his case was very much a combined operation with the Security Service providing various forms of support. In collaboration with SIS, the small group in the Security Service who were indoctrinated into the case set out to strengthen Gordievsky's position within the London residency in two ways. The first was by giving him apparently impressive (though unclassified) information designed to enhance his reputation within the KGB as a political intelligence officer – work for which his role as a British agent left him too little time. K6 sometimes lacked the resources to give all the assistance requested. This caused almost the only friction between the two Services in the history of the Gordievsky case.

The second way in which the Security Service sought to advance Gordievsky's career was by finding reasons to justify the expulsion of more senior officers in the London residency in the hope that he would be able to take their place. The two KGB officers it was most anxious to expel were the head of Line PR, Igor Titov, and the resident, Arkadi Guk. In March 1983, after discussion with Gordievsky, Titov was declared
persona non grata
. To avoid arousing any suspicion of the real motive for the decision, the case against Titov was submitted to the FCO at the same time as that against two GRU officers who had already been earmarked for expulsion and were also PNG'd.
²⁰
As had been hoped, Gordievsky succeeded Titov as head of Line PR.

Gordievsky reported to his SIS case officer that Line PR at the London residency was running half a dozen agents and more than a dozen confidential contacts, with only modest success. (At this stage he had only limited knowledge of operations by other Lines.)
¹
Neither of the London residency's
two most prominent Line PR agents, Jack Jones and Bob Edwards MP, was any longer of much significance.
²¹
Gordievsky reported that Jones had been regarded by the KGB as an agent only from 1964 to 1968. Though contact was later re-established, Jones no longer held clandestine meetings with his case officer or passed on confidential material.
²²
He ceased to be general secretary of the TGWU in 1978 and left the TUC General Council in the same year. As his case officer five years later, Gordievsky found that, unsurprisingly, Jones no longer had access to inside information of much significance. On one occasion, however, Gordievsky's report on a meeting with Jones made a considerable impression in the Centre:

One day I took with me a brochure from the Trades Union Congress which gave a long list of union leaders, and asked [Jones] to comment on them. This he did to such effect that I was later able to write a three-page summary, which I added to my report of our meeting. ‘Our agent's information on trade union personalities was so extensive', I wrote, ‘that I am attaching it as an appendix.' The combined document made it appear that he had been outstandingly helpful and volunteered many facts of the greatest value. You can see from this what the facts really were and how, by careful reporting, success can be created out of very little.
²³

Though the KGB was believed to have assessed Jones's motives as ideological during the period when it regarded him as an agent, Gordievsky found him willing to accept gifts, some of them in cash.
²⁴
The DG, Sir Tony Duff, reported to the cabinet secretary in October 1985 that Jones ‘last received money (£250) from his case officer [Gordievsky] on the instructions of the KGB Centre in May 1984'. Thereafter the Centre issued instructions that, given Jones's lack of access to confidential information, he was to be contacted only at six-monthly intervals.
²⁵

Unlike Jack Jones, the veteran KGB agent Bob Edwards MP was almost unknown outside Westminster and the ranks of the hard left. He remained, however, an enthusiastic participant in Soviet ‘active measures' (influence operations). Though there is no evidence that these had any significant impact, the KGB rated him highly and awarded him the Order of the People's Friendship, the third-highest Soviet decoration, in 1980.
²⁶
The medal remained in his file at the Centre but on one occasion was taken by his case officer, Leonid Zaitsev, to show him at a meeting in Brussels. Zaitsev, who had run Edwards while he was stationed at the London residency in the 1960s, was by then head of FCD Directorate T (science and technology) but continued as his controller – partly, Gordievsky believed, because he regarded Edwards as an old friend, partly because he liked
trips to the West as an operations officer.
²⁷
Remarkably, the KGB made arrangements to stay in contact with Edwards by radio and dead letter-box (DLB) in the event of war.
²⁸
Gordievsky reported that most of Line PR's political reporting from London to the Centre was based not on secret sources but on the press and conversations with journalists and politicians – though some contacts received substantial payments.
²⁹

Though the arrival of Gordievsky at the London residency in 1982 and the remarkable quality of the intelligence he supplied marked one of the high points of British intelligence during the Cold War, the public image was one of Soviet rather than British intelligence successes. In 1981 Chapman Pincher, with the secret assistance of the disaffected former Security Service officer Peter Wright, revealed publicly for the first time that Sir Roger Hollis had been investigated on charges of being a Soviet agent, and claimed that the charges were accurate.
³⁰
Gordievsky was able to confirm what earlier Security Service investigation had already shown
³¹
– that the charges were nonsense. The Centre was deeply puzzled as to why Hollis had ever been investigated and why the charges against him, which it knew to be false, had aroused a media storm in Britain. Igor Titov told Gordievsky after he had been PNG'd from London, ‘The story is ridiculous. There's some mysterious, internal British intrigue at the bottom of all this!'
³²
Though ridiculous, the Hollis story was front-page news in Britain and widely believed.

A Security Service brief to Mrs Thatcher dubbed 1982 ‘the year of the security scandal'.
³³
The most damaging security scandal was that of Geoffrey Prime, formerly of GCHQ, whose career as a Soviet agent came to light only after he was arrested in the summer of 1982 for sexually abusing under-age girls. He handed over to the police a 2,000-card index of girls whose telephone numbers or photographs he had obtained from local papers. His wife told the police that he had also been engaged in espionage and handed to them two plastic sachets containing one-time pads, typed instructions for reading microdots, and twenty-six envelopes containing letters addressed to East Berlin. A search of the house uncovered further espionage paraphernalia. Prime eventually admitted that after leaving GCHQ and breaking contact with the KGB in September 1977 he had been recontacted by telephone in April 1980. Regretting that he had earlier ‘let the Russians down', he flew to a meeting with a new case officer in Vienna, taking with him a series of Minox films and handwritten notes he had made during his last sixteen months at GCHQ. A Security Service assessment later concluded that, ‘Though espionage did not give him a sense of purpose, it provided a feeling of importance.' Prime spent several
days being debriefed in Vienna, mostly on board a Russian cruise ship, where he was kept apart from other passengers until the final evening when he dined on the captain's table and was introduced as a British businessman. He was questioned about, but not criticized for, his resignation from GCHQ and asked if it would be possible to rejoin. Prime said he did not wish to do so. Though told that most of the films he had brought with him had not come out, he was given £600 before returning to England. After one further meeting with a case officer in West Berlin in October 1981, the KGB ended contact with him.
³⁴

In November 1982 Prime was sentenced to thirty-eight years' imprisonment. Over the next five months he was interviewed in Long Lartin Prison by K Branch officers on thirteen occasions. His interrogators were puzzled by some of what he told them, in particular by the off-hand manner and lack of understanding shown by his Soviet case officers by contrast with the much greater professionalism shown by the KGB in running most other British agents investigated by the Security Service. Prime described, for example, how during a meeting in the Turkenschanze Park in Vienna in September 1975 the more senior of his KGB case officers, ‘Mike A', became visibly bored with the highly classified intelligence he was providing. While the more junior ‘Anatoli' carried on talking to Prime, ‘Mike A' walked away and began a game of chess with a total stranger.
³⁵
Such episodes seemed so contrary to KGB practice that the K Branch interrogators began to doubt Prime's version of events. Their doubts dissolved when it was realized that Prime had been run not by case officers of the First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for most espionage operations, but by the Third Directorate, which was out of its depth with an agent of Prime's importance.
³⁶