The Defence of the Realm (53 page)

ROBSON: Oh that person we're getting the stuff from?

McLEOD: Yes

ROBSON: O-o-o-oh!

McLeod said the girl had had to make a written statement but thought she had succeeded in concealing ‘some matters of importance'. Her statement, however, had raised suspicions about another secretary who had resigned from the Security Service early in July 1942, at precisely the point when Robson had been overheard saying that his MI5 informant had got the sack. Henceforth, wrote Cussen, ‘We assumed that [this other secretary] was the Party's original agent within the Service and that it was upon her departure that the C3 secretary had been recruited . . . as a replacement.'
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Investigation of this other secretary revealed that, while in the Security Service, she had been closely involved with a group of four Communist militants: two officers in the RAF medical branch, Wing Commander Robert Fisher and Squadron Leader John Norman Macdonald, Mary Peppin (who was married to Fisher) and her sister Geraldine. An HOW on the secretary also revealed that she had just had an illegal abortion and had been called to give evidence at the trial of the abortionist. Since she was no longer able to pass material from MI5 to the CPGB, it was decided not to interview her until after the trial. In the meantime the DG, Sir David Petrie, decided that prosecution of the C3 secretary, who had been dismissed on 24 January, would be ‘inexpedient', probably because of the nature of the evidence needed to secure a conviction.

When Cussen and Skardon on 15 July interviewed the other secretary, after the trial of her abortionist, they found her ‘in that untidy state which', they condescendingly observed, ‘was usual for her when no special occasion was involved'. Cussen began by telling her they knew about her involvement with the abortionist as well as the fact that she had concealed it from her family. She must, said Cussen, have been through hell. But ‘When you were working in our office you betrayed us. You used to visit Fisher and Macdonald and the Peppins and you used to tell them things which were in our files. I know exactly what you told them and I will tell you about it in a minute.' He implied that, if she co-operated, there would be no prosecution. She begged Cussen and Skardon ‘never to say a word about the abortion matter', then ‘broke down completely and cried, and we spent a good deal of time in restoring her'. When she recovered, she made a statement admitting passing information to the CPGB. Her interrogators were impressed by her ability to recall much of the contents of the MI5 document with which Robson had confronted Himsworth. Cussen wrote later:

Having regard to her character and ‘make-up' we both thought the account which she gave of being unable to resist the temptation of mentioning its contents to Fisher
in the presence of Mary Peppin was true. She is a mixture of an intelligent and a naive person. It is quite possible that Fisher got further information out of her, but I am inclined to think that the C3 secretary proved a much better agent when circumstances brought about the replacement of this girl.
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Though the Security Service did not uncover any wartime Soviet spy as important as Blunt or the other members of the Five, it successfully resolved a number of other espionage cases. The first began with the chance discovery by the Special Branch of photographs of classified War Office documents while searching the London home of a Communist named Oliver Green, who was arrested in May 1942 on a charge of forging petrol coupons and later sentenced to fifteen months' imprisonment. When questioned in prison in August by Hugh Shillito of F2c, Green admitted that he had been recruited as a Soviet agent while fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
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Green had first been identified as a CPGB member in 1935,
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but told Shillito that, after his recruitment, he had (like the Five) ‘cut right away from the Party and has had nothing to do with it from that day'.
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Though he refused to identify any of his sub-agents by name, he said that they included an informant in the army, a merchant seaman, a fitter in an aircraft factory, an official in a government department, a member of the RAF and a man who supplied figures on aircraft construction. Green claimed that he had forged petrol coupons only because he needed his car to maintain contact with his agent network. ‘Ideologically', noted Guy Liddell, ‘he is a curious character, and not altogether unlikeable.'
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Potentially the most worrying information provided by Green was his claim that ‘Russian Intelligence had an agent in the Security Service.' He had been assured that, ‘if British Intelligence had any suspicion about them as Soviet agents, the Centre would come to know very quickly.'
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Since it is inconceivable that any of Green's case officers would have compromised Blunt's role in MI5 by making any reference to him, it is far more likely that they were referring to the fact (already known to Shillito and Liddell) that the
CPGB
had informants within the Security Service. On Green's release from prison, he went to report to Robby Robson, the head of the Party Control Commission, at King Street. Unaware that everything he said was being picked up by MI5 microphones, Green revealed the names of his sub-agents.
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Though all were made subject to HOWs and physical surveillance, the evidence obtained against them was inadequate for a prosecution, perhaps because they had become more cautious after Green's imprisonment.
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The most important Soviet espionage case solved by the wartime Security Service was that of a spy-ring headed by the CPGB's national organizer, Douglas Springhall, who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in July 1943 for offences under the Official Secrets Act. Though the Service believed that Soviet agents normally ‘cut themselves off from the Party', Springhall took the ‘unusual step of using the Party apparatus for espionage'.
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Like Green, Springhall was discovered as the result of a lead which came from outside MI5. John Curry later concluded, ‘There was reason to think that he had been active for some years and had excellently placed informants, and might have escaped detection but for a piece of negligence on his part.'
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Among Springhall's sources was a secretary in the Air Ministry, Olive Sheehan, who passed him details of a new anti-radar device, codenamed WINDOW. Sheehan's flatmate, Norah Bond, heard her discussing classified information with Springhall, saw her handing him material and succeeded in obtaining an envelope which Sheehan planned to pass to Springhall. Bond gave the envelope to an RAF officer who steamed it open, discovered that it contained information on WINDOW and informed the Air Ministry, which told MI5.
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Security Service examination of Springhall's diary led to the discovery of two further members of his spy-ring: Ormond Uren, a staff officer in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and Ray Milne, a secretary in SIS. In November 1943 Uren, who was found to have revealed the entire ‘organisational lay-out of SOE' to Springhall, was sentenced, like Springhall, to seven years' imprisonment.
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Guy Liddell noted that, as a secretary in Section V of SIS, Ray Milne was ‘right in the middle of ISOS [Abwehr decrypts] and everything else'.
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During interrogation by Roger Hollis and the head of Section V, Felix Cowgill, Milne confessed to very little but claimed, like Springhall and Uren, that passing intelligence to Moscow was merely sharing information with an ally.
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She was dismissed but never prosecuted.
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The CPGB leadership reacted with shocked surprise to Springhall's conviction, expelling him from the Party and publicly distancing itself from any involvement in espionage. David Clarke (F2a) reported that both Pollitt and Willie Gallacher, the Party's only MP, were ‘clearly anxious to clean the Party of such activities'. In order to emphasize its British identity, at the Sixteenth Party Congress in July 1943 the Party decided to call itself the ‘British Communist Party'. Clarke, however, saw the Party's attempts to distance itself from Soviet espionage as primarily cosmetic: ‘The Soviet authorities have from time to time obtained information from most of the leading members of the Communist Party who have shown various degrees
of willingness to do this work.'
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The Home Secretary told the War Cabinet in August that the Springhall case emphasized the ‘great risk of the Party trading on the current sympathy for Russia to induce people . . . to betray [secrets]', and raised once more the question of barring Communists from access to classified information.
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Whitehall, however, still had a rather casual attitude to protective security. In February 1940 the Foreign Office had taken the long-overdue step of appointing a retired diplomat, William Codrington, as chief security officer. But Codrington was given neither a salary nor, until 1942, any assistant. Not until after the war did the Foreign Office at last establish a Security Department.
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After ‘lengthy and intricate investigations', David Clarke reported in October 1943 that fifty-seven Communist Party members working in government departments, the armed forces and scientific research had ‘access to secret information and in some cases to information of the highest secrecy'. Three Communists were employed on the TUBE ALLOYS project, Britain's top-secret atomic research programme. Clarke urged that all should be moved to non-classified work:

The whole experience of the Security Service shows that members of the Communist Party place their loyalty to the Party above their loyalty to their Service and that their signature of the Official Secrets Act always carries a mental reservation in favour of the Party. The fact that the Communist Party is at present supporting the war would not prevent them from using any secret information in their possession irresponsibly and without regard to the true interests of the country.
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Most of the fifty-seven Communists identified by Clarke had gained access to classified information because the departments concerned had no coherent vetting procedures for Party members and had failed to follow Security Service guidelines.
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The Home Secretary proposed that all Communists identified by the Security Service should be moved from secret work. Churchill was initially inclined to agree. He seems to have been persuaded otherwise by his intelligence adviser, Desmond Morton, a former SIS officer who had become hostile to the Security Service. A secret Whitehall panel which contained no Security Service representative was given responsibility for examining all cases of Communists in government departments submitted to it by the Service. The Security Service believed, probably correctly, that the panel was not up to its job. Before the panel was wound up in July 1945, it referred only one case to it.
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As well as being seriously dissatisfied with Whitehall's approach to protective security, the leadership of the Security Service was also well aware that it was failing to keep track of Soviet espionage. With at least
partial justice, it blamed its failure on the severe restrictions placed by the Foreign Office on investigation of the Soviet embassy and Trade Delegation, and therefore of the intelligence residencies for which they provided cover. In March 1943 Liddell noted in his diary:

I had a talk this morning with Hollis about Soviet espionage. There is no doubt to my mind that it is going on and sooner or later we shall be expected to know all about it. On the other hand if we take action and get found out there will be an appalling stink.
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MI5 decided not to risk ‘an appalling stink'. Blunt reported to his case officer that the Security Service had no agents inside the Soviet embassy and that even surveillance of callers at the embassy had been suspended. Only telephone calls were monitored. MI5 energies were overwhelmingly directed against Nazi Germany. Instead of welcoming this news, the Centre was incredulous. Convinced that intelligence operations against Soviet targets must be as high a priority for British intelligence as operations in Britain were for the Centre, it concluded that Blunt (like others of the Five) must be deceiving them. ‘Our task', the Centre instructed its London resident, Anatoli Gorsky, ‘is to understand what disinformation our rivals are planting on us.' Modrzhinskaya concluded in October 1943 that ‘all the data' indicated the Cambridge Five were part of an organized deception mounted by British intelligence. In reality, much of the data indicated the opposite. Before the great victory of the Red Army at Kursk in June 1943, the GRU had reported that ULTRA intelligence on German operations forwarded by Blunt from Leo Long, his sub-agent in military intelligence, was ‘very valuable'. Most of it was later ‘confirmed by other sources'. Further ULTRA intelligence from Long, the GRU concluded, was ‘highly desirable'.
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The Centre's conclusion that the Five were trying to deceive it derived not from a rational assessment of the intelligence they supplied but from its own paranoid tendencies.

To try to discover the exact nature of the British deception, the Centre sent an eight-man surveillance team to London to trail the Five and other supposedly bogus Soviet agents in a vain attempt to discover their contacts with their non-existent British controllers. The team, all conspicuously dressed in Russian clothes and unable to speak English, were inevitably and hilariously unsuccessful.
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The Centre's suspicions of the Five did not disappear until Operation OVERLORD, the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944.
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On 26 May that year Blunt passed on a complete copy of the entire deception plan devised as part of OVERLORD. On 7 July he provided a comprehensive account of B Division's role in the deception and, in particular,
its use of double agents.
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The stress of his own double life took a greater toll on Blunt than on the rest of the Five. He was under such visible strain that the Centre did not object to his decision at the end of the war to return to his career as an art historian and accept appointment as Surveyor of the King's Pictures.
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