Paul Simpson - A Brief History of the Spy

The CIA and FBI ran an agent jointly based at the United Nations for over two years. Arkady Shevchenko was a senior Soviet diplomat who had risen to Under Secretary-General at the United Nations for Political and Security Council Affairs. He had been seduced by the glamour of the West during his first posting to New York in 1958 but when he contacted the CIA in 1975 aiming to defect, he was persuaded to remain in position and act as a spy. Over the next three years, he passed over details of Soviet policy on every major issue, and as a lifelong specialist in arms control, he was able to provide key insight into Soviet negotiating strategy for the disarmament talks that were carried out by President Carter and Premier Brezhnev. Understanding the import of a summons back to Moscow in March 1978 for consultations and ‘discussion of certain other questions’, he was extracted by the CIA. During his debriefing he learned that his wife had been repatriated to Russia and had died in Moscow — he remained convinced until his death twenty years later that the KGB killed her.

The NSA had a notable success throughout the seventies with Operation Ivy Bells, a joint project between the agency and the US Navy. This was another cable-tapping similar to the operations in Vienna and Berlin during the fifties. However, rather than digging a tunnel beneath the roads of a busy metropolis, a pod was placed beneath the surface of the Sea of Okhotsk, between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Siberia, tapping into the cables that carried unencrypted traffic between the submarine base at Petropavlovsk to Soviet Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostock. The operation came to a sudden halt in 1981 when a Soviet navy salvage ship lifted the pod off the seafloor, thanks to the information supplied by a former NSA operative, Ronald Pelton.

In 1974, Harold Wilson returned to 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister, and during the two years before he stepped down in April 1976, seemed to believe that he was the target of an operation by members of MI5. Although the idea was comprehensively dismissed at the time by his successor James Callaghan, the notion of the ‘Wilson plot’ gained some credence a decade later with the publication in 1987 of former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s memoir, Spycatcher (although the credibility of that was itself knocked a year later by Wright himself).

‘Is that man mad? He did nothing but complain about being spied on!’ CIA Director George H.W. Bush said of Wilson after a meeting during the last few weeks of the prime minister’s term of office. Wilson certainly was demonstrating paranoid tendencies during this time, seeing conspiracies against himself everywhere. According to MI5’s official history these simply didn’t exist. The Security Service were certainly concerned about some of Wilson’s contacts — notably Joseph (later Lord) Kagan, who was actively being groomed by KGB officers prior to the mass expulsion of Soviet spies in 1971, and Rudy Sternberg, later Lord Plurenden, who many believed was a spy, although there was no concrete proof against him. MI5 of course had a file on Wilson, but this could only be accessed with permission from the Director-General of the Service, Sir Michael Hanley.

Part of Wilson’s mistrust of MI5 stemmed from his discovery of the Fluency Committee’s investigations of Sir Roger Hollis during the sixties, something of which he wasn’t aware at the time, but felt with hindsight he should have been. The prime minister’s relationship with Hanley deteriorated to such an extent that the Director-General considered resigning. By December 1975, Wilson’s official biography notes that he was convinced there was a plot and he was ‘reasonably certain that elements of MI5 were doing the donkey work, though at what level he did not know’, and he began turning on all the taps in the lavatory before saying anything in there.

Things weren’t improved when George Young, the former Deputy Chief of MI6, announced in March 1976 that three of Wilson’s ministers were crypto-Communists, and it’s possible that after Wilson was briefed about Young’s right-wing connections, and links to journalist Chapman Pincher, he got his services confused and discussed a plot to discredit him by ‘a very small MI5 mafia who had been out of the Service for some time who still continue their vendetta for no doubt very right wing purposes of their own’.

Wilson continued to protest he had been the subject of a conspiracy after his resignation, and cooperated with two journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, preparing a story that they printed in the Observer newspaper, which attacked MI5, and included the fact that Wilson had turned to the head of the CIA for help investigating the plot against him. Prime Minister James Callaghan instituted an internal inquiry, then reported to the House of Commons that it was clear there was nothing to the allegations.

This might have been seen as nothing more than the early onset of the illness that would torment Wilson during his retirement had it not been for Peter Wright’s book, in which it was claimed that thirty MI5 officers had given their approval to a plot against Wilson. Again, this was investigated, and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher categorically denied the allegations: ‘No evidence or indication has been found of any plot or conspiracy against Lord Wilson by or within the Security Service.’

Talking on documentary programme Panorama in October 1988, Wright admitted that in fact there was probably only one other member of MI5 who wanted to get rid of Wilson, and that his book was ‘unreliable’. However, that didn’t get anything like the publicity of the Observer article, and there are still many who believe MI5 were actively plotting — the book and TV series A Very British Coup suggest how such a plot might have played out.

Faith in its country’s security service was also lacking during this time in Australia, with the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), William T. Robertson, forced to resign over the use of an Australian agent in East Timor’s affairs in 1975. ASIS had been established in 1952 as a collector of foreign intelligence, primarily in the Asian-Pacific region, and like MI6 in Britain, it did not officially exist. During the sixties and early seventies it monitored Communist groups and paramilitary groups in Indonesia.

In the build-up to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, ASIS employed local businessman Frank Favaro to supply information on local political developments. However, he was quite unstable and in September 1975, ASIS fired him. Favaro wanted more money for the work he had done, and wrote to the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and the Foreign Minister, Don Willessee, who stated in Parliament that Favaro was a private citizen who didn’t represent the Australian government in any capacity. When Whitlam realized that ASIS had indeed hired Favaro and risked a charge of interfering in another country’s affairs, without obtaining his authority, he demanded Robertson’s resignation. When Whitlam was removed from office by the Governor General in November 1975, the new prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, claimed that the Robertson sacking was ‘a powerful argument that Whitlam was not fit to govern’.

‘We are bogged down in a war we cannot win and cannot abandon,’ one KGB general admitted privately a few years after the invasion of Afghanistan, noting that the 1979 action had led to their equivalent of the Vietnam War. And, although it wasn’t said publicly, this was the KGB’s fault.

As well as spying on the ‘Main Adversary’, the KGB was still charged with maintaining order around the Communist countries, and it became clear during 1979 that despite a Communist coup the previous April, the regime of Hafizullah Amin was precarious. The KGB residency in Kabul predicted that an anti-Soviet Islamic Republic (similar to that which had taken power in Iran the previous year) could well replace the regime unless Amin in Afghanistan went. Despite the best efforts of Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Talebov to poison him, Amin survived.