The circus, p.9
The Circus, page 9
This he did on 24 October, carrying them on a shopping tour of the West End . He then went by underground to Ruislip Manor station, where he alighted and walked to a private house in Cranley Drive.
The occupants were Peter and Helen Kroger, formerly of 18 Penderry Rise, Catford. Kroger, apparently, ran an antiquarian book business from a room in the Strand, and a check was made on his background while Skardon drove through the neighbourhood looking for a suitable observation post. One house, on the corner of Cranley Drive and Courtfield Gardens, was ideal. It overlooked the Krogers’ bungalow and was approached from Courtfield Gardens, out of view of the target property. The electoral roll revealed that a Mr and Mrs W.S. Search owned the house in question and, by chance, Mr Search’s name appeared in the Security Service’s Registry. As well as having served in the RAF, he was currently working in Birmingham as an aircraft engineer. Part of his work on gas turbine engines was classified and he had signed the Official Secrets Acts. Skardon telephoned Mrs Search and arranged to visit her on Friday 4 November.
Skardon made no mention of the Krogers when he spoke to Mrs Search, and she agreed to allow his watchers to use her front room and her daughter’s bedroom over the weekend.
The following day Lonsdale held his usual meeting with Houghton, this time at The Maypole public house in Surbiton. After a discussion in Houghton’s car and a drink in the pub the two men parted, and the next afternoon Lonsdale reappeared at Ruislip.
The surveillance continued until the first Saturday in January 1961, when Houghton and Gee were arrested by Superintendent George Smith moments after having passed a carrier bag to Lonsdale in Lower Marsh, outside the Old Vic Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. The three agents were driven to Scotland Yard and Smith sped over to Ruislip to arrest the Krogers. The bungalow in Cranley Drive turned out to be a veritable treasure trove of ingenious Soviet-made espionage paraphernalia. Even when, some two months later, the house was released by Special Branch so the Krogers ’ solicitors could take an inventory, false passports and well-concealed bundles of currency kept turning up in the unlikeliest places. A short-wave transmitter was found under the kitchen and, even though the garden had already been excavated, another transmitter was dug up by the new owners in 1980.
Houghton and Gee were very shocked at their arrest, but Lonsdale remained the true professional he was until he spotted the Krogers at Bow Street police station, shortly after they had been charged under the Official Secrets Acts. At this stage D2 still had no idea of the Krogers’ real identity, and they were obviously unwilling to help. Both they and Lonsdale refused to have their fingerprints taken, and it was only after the Magistrates Court had ordered them to comply that the FBI were able to identify Peter and Helen Kroger as Morris and Lona Cohen, American subjects of New York City. They had been wanted by the FBI since 1951 on suspicion of being accomplices of the Rosenbergs, the atom spies who had been arrested and executed in the aftermath of the Nunn May case ten years earlier.
When the five ‘Portland spies’ appeared at the Old Bailey in March 1961 before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, all pleaded not guilty. After a trial of six days they were all convicted without, incidentally, an acceptance of Houghton’s offer to turn Queen’s Evidence. Houghton and Gee received fifteen years; Lonsdale twenty-five, and the Krogers twenty each. After sentencing, Lonsdale was approached by MI5 and asked if he would consent to being interviewed. He agreed, and his former fellow-student (still working under the cover-name of Elton) conducted the interrogation. By the end of it Lonsdale had identified himself as a Soviet officer, Conon Molody, but was convinced that Houghton had been an MI5 agent who had been sucked into a trap the previous January. Although that was not the case, Elton declined to disabuse him of the idea.
Houghton had first suggested co-operating with MI5 during his trial when he passed a note to them via his Defence Counsel, Mr Henry Palmer. In it he alleged that he knew of three further Soviet case officers other than Lonsdale, two being known to him as NIKKI and JOHN. He also maintained that the Russians had boasted to him of having already penetrated the Polaris base at Holy Loch and of receiving secret information on such subjects as mines, radar, fire control and the nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought. As was their custom, the Security Service declined Houghton’s invitation, but he was interviewed on 18 and 23 May in prison after his appeal had been dismissed. On these two occasions Houghton continued to lie so MI5 advised the Admiralty, on 13 June, that Houghton could not be relied upon.
The case was in general regarded as a success, but in many respects it was inconclusive. D2 harboured a suspicion that the three Soviet agents, Lonsdale and the Krogers, had been deliberately discarded, possibly to draw attention from another operation, or perhaps to build up the reputation of a double agent.
The ‘Portland spies’ were not arrested until after ‘Sniper’, whose fourteen letters had been the initial source for the case, had defected.
Late in December 1960, he had turned up in West Berlin with his mistress and was met by a CIA case officer, Howard Roman. ‘Sniper’ turned out to be Michal Goleniewski, a high-ranking Polish Military Intelligence officer who had also informed on his colleagues to the KGB. The CIA wasted no time putting their latest star on a USAF plane to Washington. At Andrews Air Force base, he was discreetly transferred to a private car and driven straight to Ashford Farm, a sixty-eight-acre estate overlooking the Choptank River in Talbot Country, Maryland. The twenty-six-room mansion, operated as a safe-house by Peter Sivess and his wife Ellie, was to become the CIA’s principal receiving station for defectors and was arguably the most secret place in the whole of the United States.
Although Goleniewski had not brought any documents with him, he had left some three hundred photographs of documents in Warsaw and the CIA Station in the Polish capital was given directions to the right tree. The pictures were developed and turned out to be extremely valuable, particularly to MI5. One vital piece of evidence provided by ‘Sniper’, for example, was the fact that an MI6 officer in Berlin had betrayed details of the few agents MI6 were running in Poland. Although Goleniewski could not name the traitor, he did offer enough details for MI6 to narrow the field down to one man, George Blake.
Blake’s case was handled jointly by MI6 and MI5 who ran the London end of the surveillance on Blake. Blake’s first contact with British Intelligence had been in November 1943, shortly after his escape from Occupied Holland. He had joined the Royal Navy and anglicized his Dutch-Jewish family name of Behar by deed-poll to Blake, as his mother and sisters had done. In May 1944 he was recruited into SOE after a short spell in Naval Intelligence. His work for the Naval Intelligence Department in Holland and Germany after the war had marked him out as a thoroughly professional intelligence officer and, in 1947, he had been invited to join MI6. Blake agreed and spent three years at Downing College, Cambridge, learning Russian. In September 1948 he had been posted to the MI6 Station in Seoul under the diplomatic cover of Vice-Consul, where he was arrested and interned in June 1950 by the North Koreans. Blake had remained a prisoner, along with the rest of the British Legation staff, until April 1953. He had then been released and flown to London via Peking, Moscow and Berlin. After a period of leave to recover from his ordeal, Blake (now engaged to be married to a former MI6 secretary) had been offered the post of Deputy Director (Technical Operations) at the MI6 Station in Berlin. He accepted and began work there in April 1955 under the local Head of Station, Peter Lunn. After a tour of duty lasting four years Blake returned to London in April 1959. He spent the next eighteen months at MI6 headquarters in London before being posted abroad again, this time to the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, a language school based at Shemlann near Beirut and run by the British Foreign Office.
When Goleniewski’s information1 was examined by MI6 in London, it explained a number of incidents which had occurred during Blake’s four-year tour in Berlin, including Popov’s execution by the KGB and the Russian closure of PRINCE. One of Blake’s principal agents in Berlin had been Horst Eitner, code-named VICTOR. In October 1960 the West German counter-intelligence service had arrested him on suspicion of working for the Russians, as well as the British and West Germans. All these incidents added up to an unacceptable amount of coincidences and losses.
Sir Dick White, now the MI6 Chief, was satisfied that the weight of evidence against Blake would justify a confrontation. A signal was sent to the MI6 Head Station in Beirut, Nicholas Elliott, and he passed a message to Blake offering a promotion. Would Blake care to fly to London after Easter to discuss it?
The ploy worked, and Blake arrived in London on 3 April 1961. The following morning Blake reported to White, who told him he would have to answer certain questions. He was then introduced to a senior MI6 officer and Terence Lecky, who accused him directly of being a Soviet agent. Blake denied the charges, and eventually the interrogators broke off for lunch. As soon as Blake left the building, he was trailed by the MI5 watchers who observed Blake’s evident distress. At one point he walked up to a telephone kiosk and then apparently changed his mind at the last moment. Minutes later he repeated the exercise. Clearly Blake was in a state of panic and could not decide whether to ask his Soviet contacts for rescue. The watchers reported this incident to the MI6 interrogators who used Blake’s indecision with tremendous effect. Soon after his return to MI6 headquarters Blake confessed to having been a Soviet agent since his conversion in Korea in 1950.
Blake subsequently signed a statement which was given to White. He in turn authorized it to be given to Louis Gale, a senior Special Branch detective. They arrested Blake and drove him straight to Bow Street police station where he was charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Acts. The wording of the charges cited various offences since 1 September 1953.
Blake was tried at the Old Bailey on 3 March 1962. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, sentenced him to a record forty-two years’ imprisonment, stating that Blake’s espionage had rendered much of this country’s efforts completely useless.
The successful breaking-down of Blake became a textbook model for other counter-intelligence staff, but it did not mark the end of the KGB’s attempts to penetrate the British Intelligence Services.
* * *
Footnotes
1 - Goleniewski later claimed to be the last of the Romanovs and campaigned to be recognized as the Czar, but despite this eccentricity his information was judged to be of the highest quality.
5
KAGO’S REVELATIONS
‘I feel it is right to warn the House hostile intrigue and espionage are being relentlessly maintained on a very large scale.’
Harold Macmillan
14 November 1962
The first months of 1962 certainly appeared to have been eminently successful for MI5, and this was the high point of Hollis’s tenure at Curzon Street. There were, however, grounds for a cautious re-evaluation of the counterintelligence scene. When this was later forced on the Security Service, it revealed some disturbing aspects to the cases of Blake and the ‘Portland spies’.
The initial post mortem on the Portland case was made by a formal tribunal of enquiry, consisting of Sir Charles Romer, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, Sir Harold Emmerson, a former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Labour, and the recently retired Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Thistleton-Smith. None had any first-hand experience of intelligence work, but in spite of this apparent handicap the resulting Romer Committee Report made interesting reading. For example, it revealed that Portland naval base had been unaware of misconduct by Houghton whilst he was stationed at the British Embassy in Warsaw (he had created a thriving black-market sideline); that Houghton had been denounced by his ex-wife, but no notice had been taken of the allegations; that Houghton had been reported as a security risk twice in 1956. Having severely criticized the Admiralty, the Report singled out MI5 and Special Branch for particular praise, much to the delight of Hollis.
There was, however, to be a second examination of the case, which raised some serious doubts. Although Lonsdale had agreed to a ‘friendly’ interrogation by Charles Elton, he had given away very few operational secrets. He was unquestionably a professional intelligence officer, but was he quite as important as was at first thought? He was in quite a different league to Colonel Abel, whom the FBI had arrested in New York in August 1957.
Rudolph Ivanovich Abel had been betrayed to the Americans by his alcoholic Finnish assistant, Reino Hayhanen, whom he had ordered back to Moscow for lack of discipline. Hayhanen had known exactly what this meant and defected to the American Embassy in Paris on 4 May 1961. The cases of Lonsdale and Abel were similar, in that both were Soviet ‘illegals’, but the former was of a much lower calibre. The contrast between them operationally could not have been greater. Abel was discreet and security-conscious; Lonsdale was a flamboyant womanizer and always short of money. Abel’s cover was that of a quiet photographer and artist; Lonsdale was something of a spiv, constantly involving himself in get-rich-quick projects which invariably went wrong. He had a substantial overdraft at his bank and was often pursued by hire-purchase collectors. One vending-machine firm, of which he was a director, the Automatic Merchandising Company Limited, actually folded in March 1960 with debts of £30,000. Was Lonsdale’s arrest really such a coup, or would he have drawn attention to himself eventually? One of his fellow directors, in another venture, Peter Ayres, said later that he thought Lonsdale’s frequent trips abroad were suspicious and assumed that he was a spy working for the British. In June 1961 an East German defector, Captain Gunther Maennel, told the CIA that two of his colleagues, Armin Grosz and a trade official operating under the cover-name of ‘Eric Hills’ (code-named HALTER), had really run the Krogers and had been able to escape to East Germany.
Under this kind of critical examination the arrest of the Krogers appeared less of a coup. Their fingerprints had been distributed worldwide by the FBI and their photographs had been discovered in Abel’s apartment in New York. They would have been identified the moment any police officer arrested them, whatever the offence. What all four cases, Lonsdale, Abel and the two Krogers, had in common was that all were later repatriated to the USSR without completing their prison sentences.
This somewhat depressing analysis was forced on MI5 by yet another Soviet defector, Anatoli Golytsin. Goiytsin remains, even today, by far the most controversial figure in the world of intelligence, and his impact on Western counter-intelligence in December 1961 was dramatic.
The Golytsin case began in 1954 in Vienna, when Peter Deriabin, the GRU defector from Vienna, compiled a list of possible future defectors. He had placed Golytsin high on his list because he was unpopular with his colleagues and his wife, Svetlana, was known to be difficult. However, before an attempt could be made to subvert Deriabin’s candidate, he was recalled to Moscow and was not given another foreign posting, according to the CIA computers. In fact Golytsin spent six years at KGB headquarters before adopting a new identity, that of Anatoli Klimov, and a counter-intelligence job at the Russian Embassy in Helsinki,
Golytsin’s defection astonished everyone, including the CIA. One day he simply turned up on the doorstep of the CIA Station Chiefs home in Helsinki and announced he wanted asylum in America for himself, his wife and his daughter. To dispel any suspicions the CIA might have about him, he delivered the complete KGB order of battle at the Helsinki Embassy and promised to identify Soviet ‘illegals’ and their agents around the world. His details were found to be accurate, and the Golytsin family were flown to a USAF base in West Germany before arriving in Washington and Ashford Farm.
What Golytsin had to offer was well prepared. He claimed that he had spent many months accumulating information about KGB operations in the West, and he now began to produce them. What he told the CIA was to have an impact on every Western intelligence service and create a fundamental split in the counter-intelligence community.
Initially there were suspicions at Langley that Golytsin was an agent provocateur in the classical mould. He required constant attention and was undoubtedly the most demanding guest Ashford Farm had ever had to deal with. He treated his CIA Soviet Bloc Division debriefers as idiots and frequently appeared paranoid. One of his conditions for co-operation, for example, was that he should never come into contact with anyone who spoke Russian. He argued that a Russian speaker would inevitably have learnt the language from a native, and that meant he was tainted. What his CIA hosts found particularly trying was his habit of making traps for his debriefers, testing them to see if they were merely concealing the fact that they understood Russian. He saw KGB everywhere and, judging by the number of people he denounced, he was quite justified.
For their part, the CIA were less than polished in their handling of someone whom they initially regarded as a top-grade, but temperamental, defector who suffered from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. Instead of providing AE/LADLE (his CIA code-name) with stimulating conversations on his intellectual level, they simply left him alone to brood in-between debriefing sessions. Virtually his only companionship was with CIA guards who, to put it mildly, were not selected for their drawing-room manners.
In spite of this insensitive treatment Golytsin never ceased in describing the files of agents and operations he had spotted in Moscow. He revealed the existence of the SAPPHIRE network in Paris, which consisted of Soviet agents in the French intelligence organization SDECE and denounced a member of General de Gaulle’s Cabinet, Jacques Foccart.1 This item of information was considered so sensitive that President Kennedy wrote personally to General de Gaulle to inform him. SDECE dispatched a senior French military intelligence officer, General Temple de Rougemont, to Washington in secret to question AE/LADLE further. De Rougemont interrogated him for three days, at the end of which time he was forced to admit that the defector appeared to have incredibly secret information about SDECE and its internal structure. SDECE had been completely reorganized in 1958, yet the KGB had the very latest details of its personnel. To make matters worse, Golytsin boasted that security in Paris was so lax that new NATO plans were in Moscow within forty-eight hours of them being printed in Paris. To prove that particular point, Golytsin submitted to a test to identify genuine and specially prepared NATO documents. He spotted all the fakes. A fictionalized account of the affair was described by Leon Uri’s in Topaz,2 in which Golytsin is referred to as ‘Boris Kuznetov’. It resulted in the SDECE representative in Washington, Philipe de Vosjoli, deciding to remain in the United States rather than return to Paris at the end of his tour of duty.
