Chapter 20 Chapter Eighteen

The whole of the sixties left one unresolved question, perhaps the most important one of all - whether there was a "rat" within MI5 that had yet to be discovered.The "fluid" working group, which looks at the history of British intelligence infiltrations, is working in parallel with the three branches of D, which are responsible for investigations.Hollis had little interest in the Fluency project, mainly because the project would not be reported until December 1965, when he would retire.Hollis still believes that the problem of infiltration was closed after the October 1964 meeting to discuss the Second Symonds Report.He ordered all those involved in the Mitchell case not to discuss the case, not even among themselves.This is an impossible requirement.One event that caused the expected outrage and consternation was several visits by Hollis in 1963.He visited the U.S. and Canada and informed the CIA, FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that Mitchell might be a spy.Shortly after Hollis' visit, I also traveled to Canada.Undiscovered "earthworm" microphones that had been mounted in the walls of the Soviet embassy since 1956 were suddenly dug up by a team of Soviet raiders.They didn't search first, but they knew exactly where the microphone was, and we heard them take it out of the wall before the line went down.

The RCMP suspected that Mitchell had sabotaged the operation, and Jim Bennett, chief of the RCMP's counterintelligence division, began asking me about it.Impossible to divert his interest, I sent him a brief report on the evidence of upper-level infiltration.Actually, I have my own theory, and I'm pretty sure the "earthworm" mics were known to the Soviets as far back as 1956, so they didn't use them except occasionally for consular business To do something else.However, it was not until 1964 that they had a clear idea of ​​the exact location of this system.This is dovetailing with the investigation into Mitchell.The investigation considered in detail the possibility that Mitchell might have betrayed Operation Fluency in 1956.Both Hollis and Mitchell received detailed reports in 1956, including details of the working methods of the "earthworm" system.The operation undoubtedly leaked out at that time.Whether Mitchell did it or Hollis did it, the Soviets couldn't extract the microphones without knowing their exact location, unless they had an inspector come and find them.Although the Soviets knew the exact scope of the monitoring, but after more than 20 days of searching, they still could not find these microphones.

Jones lost his temper when he heard that I had talked about infiltration in Canada.I told him that after Hollis' unsuccessful visit, it was impossible to avoid talking about it, and that ignoring the issue would only make things worse for our allies. Washington is equally interested.I thought of all the parties at Michael McCall's house.This man succeeded Harry Stone as MI5's covert liaison officer in Washington in 1964.Angleton and I stayed away from talking to the others, and he came after me to ask me what was going on inside MI5. "What the hell is up with you guys," he kept saying, "that Hollis has come in here and told some wild stories about Mitchell. He doesn't seem to know the crux of the case, he hasn't had a trial, and now But he said there was no problem!..."

I tried to explain the whole case to him.I told him we thought the Mitchell matter was cleared up.I said that, as far as Arthur and I were concerned, Hollis was our next suspect.I asked him if there was anything he could give us to help with the case, and he said he'd see what he could do.It was a difficult time for the CIA. Kennedy had just been assassinated, the Warren Commission was investigating, and Angleton had his own urgency to deal with. In 1965, the British security services once again seemed to have gone awry in the eyes of the Americans.In just four years, a series of espionage scandals and disasters engulfed both MI5 and MI6.First, Holden was found out, and he betrayed an important part of NATO's underwater detection system.While the Horton case marked a triumph for MI5's new counterintelligence capability, it drew the ire of the US Navy and long-standing hostility towards its British counterpart.This hostility surfaced at a meeting of the National Security Council shortly after the Horton case came to light.At this meeting, the U.S. Navy attempted to completely sever the intelligence and secret exchange relationship between Britain and the United States.Jim Angleton and the FBI's Al Belmont nip the Navy's conspiracy bud.

"The only difference between them and us is that they catch spies and we don't," said Belmonte dryly. But Belmonte's words did little to lessen the chain of disasters that ensued.Black's trial and sentencing in 1961 cast doubt on nearly all CIA operations in Europe, including the Berlin Tunnel operation.The following year, 1962, Vassar was captured again; thanks to a British spy, NATO's most valuable naval secrets were once again revealed to the East.Philby defected in January 1963, apparently because of the silence and incompetence of the British authorities.In the same year, the Profumo incident, which is full of security implications, took place.The Soviets, through Christine Keeler, sought classified nuclear information from Profumo, something the FBI believed at the time.Brent, Long, and Cairncross confessed in 1964, and other cases were simply disgraced in court.The Kodak case in 1964 was one of them, but in the eyes of Americans, the Multrey case in early 1965 was even worse.

The Multrie case began in 1963. "Fedora" accused that the KGB had a foreigner specializing in theoretical intelligence within a nuclear research group in the UK, and he had been active only in the last one or two years.This shows that the defector Golitsin did not know him, thus greatly narrowing the scope of suspects.After making a few wrong moves, we focused our investigation on Yesep Maltri.The man had come to Coulham Laboratory from the European Atomic Energy Agency in the fall of 1962, but Maltry had not been given access to classified atomic material.The investigation is still ongoing.Like Horton in the Lonsdale case, it is possible that Maltri obtained the secrets while in Portland through a girlfriend who had access to them, so it is entirely possible that he wanted access to secrets that he did not have access to. .

Further investigation did not yield any evidence that Maltri had access to classified information.During a search of his office in Coulham we found material relating to the meeting in a locked drawer of his desk.Maltri was on vacation in Europe at the time.As soon as he came back, he was taken away at the South Airport.The Special Office interrogated him and identified a Soviet man he knew named Karl Bekol.He had a map indicating the scheduled meeting.A search of his home in Abingdon turned up a hidden device containing miniature one-time pads of the same kind as Lonsdale's.Part of one page of one codebook had apparently been used.A diary was also found detailing how letters and, of course, words were converted into grids of numbers so that one-time pads could be used to convert messages into ciphers.

Hollis called a long meeting to decide how to act.Mitchell was also in attendance.The critical factor was that no evidence was found that Maltri had access to the secrets or passed them on to a foreigner. There was indeed a provision in the Official Secrets Act that made preparations for espionage a crime, but even proving that Maltri was preparations for espionage was difficult, and there was no evidence that he had clandestine contacts with foreigners.GCHQ could only prove that the codebooks were similar to the ones the spies used to communicate with their Russian masters, but unlike the Lonsdale case, they couldn't prove that Multrie had actually done that.What is often not realized is that it was GCHQ's testimony in the Lonsdale case that guaranteed the convictions of the defendants.Without such evidence, Lonsdale and his collaborators would have gotten away with it or had their sentences reduced.

As an MI5 signal expert, I pointed out to my superiors at the meeting that the evidence in MI5's possession was not even sufficient to prove Maltri's motives for passing secrets to foreigners.However, the Legal Department of the Security Bureau insisted on using the "preparatory action" provision in the "Official Secrets Regulations" to trap Maltri and use it as a valid reason to prosecute.To the astonishment of the professional counterintelligence officers present, Hollis and Mitchell urged the prosecution of Maltri.As a result, the Attorney General really filed a public prosecution, causing MI5 to suffer a lot of losses.

Even to this day, I still can't understand why the Multrie case went ahead.I can only remember this day of judgment—July 2, 1963.This was when the Mitchell case was at its height.Clearly, it would suit the Russians and Hollis if the counterintelligence component of MI5 were to be eliminated at this time. One more case that should be considered here is that of Frank Bossard.In early 1965, "Top Hat," a GRU spy who joined the FBI, provided photographic copies of top-secret documents from the British Ministry of Supplies.This is material related to missile weapons, involving high-level secrets of the United States, and the scope of suspects can be easily narrowed down to a few people.We used all surveillance methods to control these suspects.We found that Bossard, one of the suspects, occasionally went to the left luggage room of Waterloo Station at lunchtime to pick up a suitcase, and then went to a restaurant in Bloomsbury, where he booked himself a suitcase under a false name. Room.He stayed alone in that room for half an hour.When he left the room, he returned the suitcase to the left luggage room and went back to work.MI5 soon removed the box from Waterloo and found inside it several document reproduction cameras, boxes of film and two records containing eight Russian songs.The details of these Russian songs were copied.Everything in the box was copied with a camera and then put back in the box.The boxes were sent back to Waterloo Station.I called Communications Headquarters and told them the details of what was recorded on the record.It took less than half an hour for the Government Communications Headquarters to find out that five of the songs were transmitted by a Russian transmitter. After searching for the location, it was found that the transmitter was in the Moscow area, and it was a Russian radio transmitter. Intelligence agencies use GRU transmitters.

We decided to arrest Bossard the next time he took the case out of Waterloo Station and took it to the hotel, March 15, 1965.He was caught remaking top secret documents that day.Confronted with the fact that MI5 knew the contents of the five recorded songs, he admitted that he offered the Russians for money photographic copies of secret documents, which he placed in dead letter drop boxes such as the Metro class and then get the money back through the same channel.After being recruited by the Russians, he had only seen the Russians once in nearly five years.He said that the song from the telegraph machine was to indicate which dead letter boxes could be delivered and which ones could no longer be used.MI5 had all the evidence they needed and prosecuted under Section 1.On May 10, 1965, Bossard was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison. Since we now know that the intelligence source of "Top Hat" is an insider, why did the Russians decide to abandon Bossard?First, the Russians successfully used the "Fedora" and the Maltri case against MI5 in 1963, with the result that MI5 in particular became more suspicious that "Fedora" was an intermediary. Insider.In 1964, Top Hat informed MI5 that the Prime Minister's office had been bugged using technical means.This is unlikely unless the Russians have a more advanced wiretapping system than we know.All our efforts to search for such a bugging system in use failed, leading the British to believe the news was fabricated, and both MI5 and the FBI to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Top Hat. The photocopies of British top-secret documents provided by Top Hat not only make it difficult to believe that he is an inserted insider (one asks: will the Russians abandon such a source of information?), but will once again cause the United States Serious doubts about British security services have sparked calls in the United States to cut off the transfer of secrets to Britain.If there was a spy to choose for adventure, Bossard was the ideal man.He had practically no physical contact with the Russians, and his control of the Moscow radio was achieved through harmless songs.Without a detailed analysis by GCHQ, we would not have been able to understand the significance of the records, nor would we be able to prove the communications between Russian intelligence and Bossard.Therefore, Bossard can only be prosecuted on the grounds of illegal copying of classified documents, and such technical crimes are often relatively lightly punished.The technical expertise of GCHQ and MI5 caught the Russians out again.This success had two major effects. It not only enabled US intelligence to protect British interests within the US government, but it also deepened rather than lessened suspicion of the Top Hat. But one cannot fail to ask the basic question: Why do the Russians think they have to exaggerate the authenticity of the "top hat"?He had been active since late 1962, and the Russians would not have known that we had suspected him if there hadn't been an ear in the upper echelons of MI5, the FBI, or the CIA.At the end of 1964, MI5 became more and more skeptical about this. Only Sullivan, the director of the FBI's domestic intelligence division, had no doubts about the authenticity of the "top hat", but Sullivan was definitely not a Russian spy.At the CIA, only Angleton and one or two close associates had doubts about the authenticity of the top hat.The few MI5 people who knew about Top Hat didn't believe he was a real spy.Hollis also knew that these people were very skeptical about the authenticity of the "top hat." There were other tensions over the alliance.The U.S. intelligence community was profoundly hostile to Harold Wilson's rise to power in 1964 and the Labor government.This was partly due to anti-Labor bias and partly due to Labor's decision to drop the Polaris missiles - a pledge they quickly rescinded. Since Hollis' visit to Washington in late 1963, fears of the Mitchell affair and of MI5 itself being heavily infiltrated at or near the top have loomed over everything, and SIS was clearly incapable of addressing this question.Arthur Martin's dismissal only served to heighten America's suspicions.They knew that Martin was devoted to searching for "Stalin's Brits" wherever they hid, and it seemed to the Americans that a public school clique had sent him off. Things came to a head in mid-1965 when President Johnson appointed the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee to examine British security matters.The committee, made up of retired intelligence community leaders, bankers, industrial entrepreneurs and politicians, advises the president on improving national security.Two of them were tasked with examining top-secret operations—Gordon Gray, Eisenhower's secretary of defense, governor of North Carolina, and now secretary of the committee; Gerald Coyne, a former senior FBI official, had chaired the committee for fifteen years. In the summer of 1965, Gray and Coyne quietly came to London and began to investigate the Anglo-American intelligence relationship, especially the effectiveness of MI5.The work was done with such care that no one in British intelligence knew it was going on.In any country, such investigations would have an ugly name - espionage.Much of Gray and Coyne's material was provided by Cleveland Crumb, the CIA officer in London who was in charge of liaison with MI5.Crumb was a talented, level-headed CIA officer with years of service in London who knew all too well about MI5's weak spots.Cram took Gray and Coyne to Leconfield House and MI6 headquarters several times, but only introduced them as colleagues.At the time, all CIA officers of Cram's stature were openly in and out of all British intelligence groups, and it was very easy for him to tell us such lies. I first heard of Gray and Coyne's expedition when I visited Washington in 1965.Angleton introduced me to the content of the finalized report, and I was very surprised.In a devastating critique of MI5, Gray and Coyne cite the modest size of the British counterespionage effort, saying that many capable officers were wasted due to poor organization and lack of financial resources.The report was particularly critical of the quality of leadership within MI5, particularly that of Hollis and then-Counterintelligence chief Cumming.Gray and Coyne concluded that Hollis had apparently lost confidence not only among senior officials (which was true) but also among his peers in Whitehall (which was also true). Angleton was thrilled by the report, which he told me would lay the groundwork for a new relationship between British and American counterintelligence work.He also told me that the CIA planned to go directly to Harold Wilson with David Bruce, the American ambassador in London, and report to him the findings of the expedition. "Everything is going to change," he said. "We're going to populate the London station of the CIA and half of them will be working directly within MI5. We're going to touch everything and we're going to help you as much as we can." Immediately after hearing Gray and Coyne's report, I found myself in an awkward position.Angleton trusted me to tell me this, but it is my duty to go back and report the existence of such a document and the plan to find Wilson.Angleton's ambitions were blatant: he wanted the CIA to swallow up the entire MI5 and use it as the CIA's foreign outpost.I went back to London and told Hollis and Jones all I knew, and this time shocked Hollis more than he seldom loses his composure.He ordered verification of the records, and within hours it was confirmed that Gray and Coyne had indeed visited every British intelligence service, but never announced their true purpose. That afternoon, I saw the two of them get into a car waiting in front of the Leconfield Building. "Thanks for your help, Peter," Jones said gloomily, "the bloody Yankees can never be trusted to play by the book!" I suppose it's a hypocritical sentiment, but I think it's best not to get involved in the developing situation. in disputes.Hollis and Jones went to the Foreign Secretary to protest this shameless abuse of the Anglo-American agreement.It is impossible to tell when this quarrel will end. Poor Crumb got a slap in the face for objecting to Wilson, and it was Helms and Angleton who insisted that he question George Wiig, Wilson's national security adviser, but Hollis There was no heart to forgive him, for he had been insulted before the intelligence agencies of the whole of Britain and the United States.He threatened Kramm that if there were any further similar violations of the agreement, he would drive Kramm away.A few days later, I saw Klum dodging up the fifth floor of the Leconfield Building, looking a little embarrassed. "You've pretty much beat me," he said with a wry smile.He knew that the CIA had been trying to do this all along, but now he was being caught outright.The Gray and Coyne report was a grisly indictment from Hollis's tenure as security chief, and Hollis knew it.But the Americans dealt with this matter with typical out-of-the-box recklessness. Their basic plan was good, and they wanted to provide MI5 with the financial and human resources it lacked.Of course they had another motive, which was that they wanted MI5 to be an appendage rather than a fully equipped independent ally. This report has really improved our work.For the first time, MI5 bosses acknowledged the need for a massive expansion of D Branch, as did stale, withered colonial products such as E Branch.From then on, Division D enjoyed priority in the allocation of manpower and material resources, and the newly expanded Division D inevitably had to find a new leader for itself.As a result, Alec McDonald, the former colonial policeman, was sent to Department D, and Malcolm Cumming decided to retire early after knowing that he would never become the deputy chief. Another important initiative emanating from the report is the acknowledgment of the need for an agency to ensure closer cooperation among Western counterintelligence agencies.GCHQ and the NSA have formally exchanged intelligence and secrets under the terms of the Anglo-American agreement, and MI6 and the CIA regularly communicate through the Joint Intelligence Committee in London and the National Security Council in Washington. Exchange foreign intelligence analysis.But counterintelligence work is largely ad hoc.Angleton and I have often talked about the value of organizing a seminar on the free exchange of counterintelligence, if the best progress is to be made, the exchange of counterintelligence across borders, especially from defectors and access to every National archives are the most basic conditions.Angleton was a dogmatic man who wanted to use the Gray-Coyne report to force us into a one-way exchange, but he did end up acknowledging the benefits of reciprocal seminars.At his urging, we organized a meeting of senior counterintelligence officials from the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that took place approximately every eighteen months.This meeting was called CAZAB, and the first meeting was held in Melbourne, Australia, in November 1967. The Gray-Coyne report wasn't the only misfortune in Hollis' life. As he approached retirement, the framework for "fluid" work was set.The working group included Terrence Leckie and Geoffrey Hinton of MI6's Counterespionage Division and Arthur Martin, transferred in 1965, with Patrick Stewart, Anne · Ol Ewing and Evelyn McBarnett of Division 3 of D, and I served as the task force leader.The files were sent directly to Alec McDonald, Chief of D Division, and Christopher Philpotts, Chief of Counterintelligence.We meet every Thursday in my office or in the conference room on the sixth floor of the Leconfield Building. The atmosphere was tense at the beginning.Every member understood the dire significance of the task at hand - to scrutinize every allegation that British intelligence had been infiltrated. The first decision that Fluency made was to change the approach Arthur and I had taken to address the infiltration problem in the Mitchell case.When we presented the infiltration case to Dick White in 1963, we relied heavily on various analyzes of the special circumstances and contradictory points in the technology case and the double agent case, which the jargon calls "disjointed." Fluency decided to ignore all the "disconnects" that obscured the defector's clear allegations of infiltration issues that alone were the original basis, and focused our attention entirely on them . The first task is to check these allegations.Much of the work in the Mitchell survey has already been done, and the rest is relatively straightforward, so I propose to do it as part of an overall three-disciplinary research program at Division D. After six months of work, we compiled a vast dossier that included a full list of allegations—more than two hundred in all, some dating as far back as World War I.These allegations were distributed to various officers within the group.Charges from Poland, like those of Goriniewski, were assigned to Terence Leckie.Evelyn McBarnett handled the old MI5 allegations, Patrick Stewart worked on the Golitsin material, and I went through the Krivitsky, Volkov, and Operation Winona files. As soon as the allegations were collected, we evaluated them.We scrutinized each allegation and made a decision about its validity—that is, whether we were sure it was true.For example, a defector might say that MI5 or MI6 had a spy, can we tell whether this allegation is true or not?If we're convinced the charge is true, in counterespionage jargon we call it a "truth list," and then we check to see if each charge has been attributed to a known spy, such as Phil Bee, Burgess, or Brent, if it has been generalized, we will re-examine this generalization in the light of information that later emerges. The assessment of allegations depends on the quality of our records.MI6 file confusion is a major problem we face, with each regional section and counterespionage branch keeping their own records.MI6 being a purveyor of intelligence, not a collator, gave little thought to an effective record keeping system, which is one of the main reasons why so many allegations are left unaddressed.It was therefore agreed that improvements to the MI6 archives needed to be done as an additional work for us.In 1967 Arthur finally left Counterespionage to take over the MI6 archives.There he undertook a comprehensive reorganization of the file system, making his last major contribution to British intelligence. After a thorough examination, the two hundred charges were grouped into one of six categories: a.The allegation is "a list of truths" that can be definitively attributed to a known spy; b.The allegation is "a list of truths" that can almost be attributed to a known spy; c.The allegation was "a true list" but could not have been attributed to a known spy; d.Due to insufficient intelligence material, it is impossible to conclude whether the allegation is "a true list"; e.the allegation is to be challenged; f.The accusation is not "a true list", it is like nonsense. As Hollis neared retirement, work on Fluid began to reveal a new picture of MI5's infiltrated history.Many of the allegations had previously been attributed to known spies, such as Philby or Brent, but were later investigated in detail and found to have been misattributed.We re-examined two hundred allegations, and twenty-eight of them fell into the most important category c—they were all "true lists" but pointed to undiscovered spies. Of the twenty-eight allegations, ten were really important, all related to MI5: 1.Volkov's "acting leader" in September 1945; 2.Guzenko's "Eri", also in September 1945; 3.Skripkin's mutiny, dated 1946 (information from Rastvorov in 1954); 4.Gorinevsky's "Middle Agent" from the 1950s; 5.Information from Golitsin's Skripkin investigation, also in 1946; 6.Information on special safes at Golitsin's KGB headquarters for storing material from British intelligence; 7.Golitsin's KGB headquarters housed archives indexing British intelligence material; 8.Golitsin's "Technical Issues" document intelligence; 9.Golitsin's information on special arrangements for the protection of the Soviet colony in London; 10.Golitsin leaked information about Crabbe's diving operations. Golitsin's charges date from 1962 to 1963. What's really amazing about this list is the way it's arranged.It is arranged in a clear chronological order from 1942 to 1963.Golitsin's material, while newer, was not definitive enough to point to a single official, but it showed that the allegations were clearly about high-level infiltration.The first three charges, while old, changed the "flow" job and pointed the finger at Hollis for the first time.