Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

After some persuasion, the new Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, wrote a joint memo with Douglas-Home on 30 July 1971 to the prime minister, warning that there were at least 120 Soviet intelligence officers (from the KGB or GRU) in the UK, and that they were causing serious problems. ‘If the cases of which we have knowledge are typical, the total damage done by these Soviet intelligence gatherers must be considerable,’ they wrote. ‘Known targets during the last few years have included the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence; and on the commercial side, the Concorde, the Bristol ‘‘Olympus 593’’ aero-engine, nuclear energy projects and computer electronics.’ On 4 August, Douglas-Home sent a final warning to Gromyko about ‘inadmissible Soviet activities’.

Operation Foot would have taken place in October had it not been for the defection of KGB officer Oleg Lyalin on 3 September. Lyalin had been providing information to MI5 since the previous April, revealing his role as the senior representative of Department V, the KGB’s sabotage and covert affairs section. According to the plans Lyalin was compiling, seaborne sabotage groups would land at Hayburn Wyke on the north Yorkshire coast (240 miles north of London) with airborne colleagues dropping in north of the Caledonian Canal to cause major problems for the British infrastructure. In addition, he had been the case officer for Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, the KGB spy in the GLC motor licensing department; Abdoolcader was arrested two weeks after Lyalin’s defection.

On 24 September, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Denis Greenhill, told the Soviet chargé d’affairs that ninety GRU or KGB officers were being expelled, and fifteen others who were in the Soviet Union at the time had their visas revoked. The following day Douglas-Home faced an angry Gromyko at the UN, who warned it was dangerous for Britain to threaten the USSR. Douglas-Home apparently burst out laughing and said, ‘Do you really think that Britain can ‘‘threaten’’ your country? I am flattered to think that this is the case.’ Gromyko complained about the ‘hooligan-like acts of the British police’ and expelled eighteen British diplomats, but the matter didn’t escalate. The success of Operation Foot led to MI5’s standing within the international intelligence community rising.

KGB operations were hampered but not stopped altogether — in fact their key operative in the UK wasn’t affected by Operation Foot at all, since he was controlled from abroad. This was Geoffrey Prime, whose work at the British SIGINT headquarters at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) building in Cheltenham and elsewhere could have been much more damaging to British interests than it was, MI5 believed, had he been run by the KGB First Directorate, who handled most espionage operations. The Third Directorate, to whom Prime reported, weren’t used to handling such sensitive material. Even so, during his time at Cheltenham, the Russians suddenly changed their communications procedures, making them impenetrable to NSA and GCHQ analysts.

Prime had offered his services to the Russians while stationed with the RAF in West Berlin in 1968 — leaving a message at a Soviet checkpoint, asking Soviet intelligence to contact him — and was encouraged by them to apply for a post with GCHQ. He would later claim that he worked for the KGB ‘partly as a result of a misplaced idealistic view of Russian Communism which was compounded by basic psychological problems’. Prime was a sexual pervert, whose interest in young girls would eventually lead to his arrest.

During his work at GCHQ, Prime had access to intercepts that he would pass through to his Soviet controllers, using his own judgement as to what was important. Like many spies before him, Prime suffered from stress because of his double life, exacerbated by his sexual problems, and eventually, in 1977, he resigned from GCHQ, and went on to work as a Cheltenham taxi driver. The KGB left him alone for three years, before trying to reactivate him in 1980, but although Prime provided them with material he had obtained during his final few months at Cheltenham, he wasn’t willing to try to regain his old job. His espionage activities were only revealed after his arrest on child sex charges in 1982 when his wife handed over one-time pads and other spy equipment to the police. Prime was sentenced to thirty-eight years’ imprisonment (thirty-five for spying, three for the sex offences), of which he served nineteen. In an echo of the Rosenberg case, Prime was told by the judges that if Britain had been at war with the Soviet Union, he would have been sentenced to death.

When the KGB began reactivating their agents, they discovered that one of their most important assets over the years was no longer in a position to help them, since she had retired! Melita Norwood’s long service to Communism passing over atomic secrets had been recognized with the Order of the Red Banner in 1958; she eventually collected it in Moscow in 1979. She had evaded detection by the Security Service in the UK over the years (‘a harmless and somewhat uninteresting character’ was the assessment in April 1966) and had been instrumental in recruiting other agents including a civil servant, code-named Hunt. He was reactivated in 1975 via a French agent, but according to KGB papers supplied by Vitali Mitrokhin when he defected in 1992, Hunt’s usefulness was pretty minimal, and an MI5 investigation concluded that it was unlikely that his activities caused any significant damage. That assessment was also applied to three other agents — a chemical engineer, a lab assistant, and an aeronautics and computer engineer — who were brought back into the KGB fold in the mid-seventies.

The Soviets were able to get useful information from some agents during the decade. Code name Ace, aircraft engineer Ivor Gregory, was recruited for cash by the London residency in 1967, and was able to pass technical details on numerous planes, including Concorde, aero-engines and flight simulators, which enabled the Soviets to create their own versions. He died in 1982, although his treachery wasn’t discovered until a decade later.

Michael John Smith, code-named Borg, was an electronics engineer, who received security clearance when reports of his earlier affiliation to the Communist party weren’t cross-filed properly. He started working for the KGB in May 1975 and in the three years before his security clearance was revoked, he was able to pass the Soviets vital information from his employment at Thorn EMI defence contractors on the then top-secret Project XN-715, developing and testing radar fuses for Britain’s free-fall nuclear bomb. His material was so good that the KGB suspected he was a double agent, and went so far as to test him with a non-contact polygraph during a trip to Vienna. However, the Soviets broke off contact after he lost his security clearance, until he changed jobs; then between 1990 and 1992, he supplied information from the General Electric Company. He was betrayed when his original case officer, Victor Oshchenko, defected in 1992; Smith was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, reduced to twenty on appeal. Since his release, he has campaigned ‘to discover and expose the full story behind the conspiracy that led to my conviction of supposedly spying for the Russians in the early 1990s’, according to his blog.

‘It is hard to overstate the damage done to the intelligence service during the seventies,’ CIA Director William J. Casey said in a speech in 1982. ‘Unrelenting questioning of the Agency’s integrity generated a severe loss of credibility.’ Although the Church Committee and other assaults on the CIA certainly caused severe problems for the Agency, they were the cause of some of their own difficulties.