Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

In October 1952, a few months after Norwood returned to the MGB, the first British atomic bomb was successfully tested on the Monte Bello islands off the north-west coast of Australia, hitherto known chiefly for their pearl divers and shipwrecks. Stalin had been far better briefed on the construction of the bomb than most British ministers. Attlee never allowed discussion of the TUBE ALLOYS project by his whole cabinet, later claiming censoriously that “some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” Churchill was amazed, after winning the 1951 election, to discover that Attlee had concealed the 100-million-pound cost of the atomic bomb from both Parliament and most of his ministers. 4

Over the next twenty years Norwood had seven different controllers: six officers of the KGB London residency (Yevgeni Aleksandrovich Belov, Georgi Leonidovich Trusevich, Nikolai Nikolayevich Asimov, Vitali Yevgenovich Tseyrov, Gennadi Borosovich Myakinkov and Lev Nikolayevich Sherstnev) and one illegal (BEN). For security reasons Norwood actually met her controllers only four or five times a year, usually in the suburbs of south-east London to hand over the documents she had been collecting. 5

The rivalry between the Centre and the GRU for control of Norwood during the Second World War and the early Cold War—decided in both cases in the Centre’s favor—gives a clear indication of her importance as an agent. According to her file, some of the ST which she supplied “found practical application in Soviet industry.” (Mitrokhin’s notes, alas, give no further details.) In 1958 HOLA was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Two years later she was rewarded with a life pension of 20 pounds a month, payable with immediate effect, despite the fact that she was twelve years off from retirement at the Non-Ferrous Metals Association. Norwood, however, was an ideological agent who did not work for money. After her retirement she refused further payment, saying she had enough to live on and did not need it. 6

Norwood also acted as agent-recruiter. The only recruit identified in Mitrokhin’s notes, however, is the civil servant HUNT, whose cultivation Norwood began in 1965. In the fourteen years after HUNT’s recruitment in 1967, he provided ST and intelligence on British arms sales (on which no further details are available). In the late 1970s the London residency gave him 9,000 pounds to found a small business, probably in the hope that he could use it to supply embargoed technology. 7

SO FAR AS is known, no Soviet agent recruited after the Second World War ever penetrated the British intelligence community quite as successfully as Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. Within a few months of Philby’s dismissal from SIS in June 1951, however, the MGB began the recruitment of another SIS officer, the 29-year-old George Blake, né Behar. Blake had been born in Rotterdam of a naturalized British father (by origin a Sephardic Jew from Constantinople) and a Dutch mother who called their son George in honor of King George V. During the Second World War Blake served successively in the Dutch Resistance and in the Royal Navy, before joining SIS in 1944. There was much that SIS had failed to discover about its new recruit, notably the influence on him of his older cousin, Henri Curiel, co-founder of the Egyptian Communist Party, a man—according to Blake—with “immense charm and a dazzling smile [which] made him very attractive, not only to women, but to all who met him.” In 1949 Blake was posted by SIS to South Korea, working under diplomatic cover as vice-consul in Seoul. A year later, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, he was interned by the invading North Koreans. 8

In the autumn of 1951 Blake handed his captors a note, written in Russian and addressed to the Soviet embassy, saying that he had important information to communicate. At a meeting with Vasili Alekseyevich Dozhdalev of the KGB, he identified himself as an SIS officer and volunteered to work as a Soviet agent. Following a favorable assessment by Dozhdalev, the London resident, Nikolai Borisovich Rodin (alias “Korovin”), traveled to Korea to complete Blake’s recruitment as agent DIO-MID, and arranged to meet him in the Netherlands after the end of the Korean War. According to Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondrashev, who became Blake’s controller in Britain in October 1953, the Centre considered him so important that no other member of the London residency was permitted to know either DIOMID’s identity or the fact that he worked for SIS. 9

KGB files give Blake the credit for two major successes during the 1950s. First, his intelligence—together with previous information from Philby and that supplied by Heinz Felfe, 10a Soviet agent in the West German BND—is said to have made possible the “elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the GDR in 1953-5.” 11In his memoirs, published in 1990, Blake claimed that he had betrayed almost 400 Western agents in the Soviet Bloc, but insisted that none had come to any harm—an improbable assertion swiftly denied by, among others, Oleg Kalugin. According to Blake, some of those he betrayed “are today taking an active part in the democratic movements of their respective countries in eastern Europe.” Many more, however, were executed in the 1950s. 12

Blake’s second major achievement as a Soviet agent was to alert the Centre to one of the most remarkable Western intelligence operations of the Cold War—the secret construction of a 500-meter underground tunnel from West to East Berlin built to intercept landlines running from the Soviet military and intelligence headquarters in Karlshorst. At a meeting with his controller on the top deck of a London bus in January 1954, Blake handed over a carbon copy of the minutes of an SIS—CIA conference on the tunnel project, codenamed operation GOLD. Blake was posted to the SIS Berlin station in April 1955, one month before the tunnel became operational. The Centre, however, dared not interfere either with the tunnel’s construction or with its early operations for fear of compromising Blake, who had established himself as by far its most important British agent.

By the time the KGB staged an “accidental” discovery of the tunnel in April 1956, operation GOLD had yielded over 50,000 reels of magnetic tape recording intercepted Soviet and East German communications. The intelligence yield was so considerable that it took over two years after the end of the operation to process all the intercepts. Though the FCD was able to protect its own communications, it was curiously indifferent to the interception of those of the rival GRU and of Soviet armed forces. There is no evidence to support past claims that the intelligence generated by operation GOLD was muddied by significant amounts of KGB disinformation. CIA and SIS intelligence reports on the operation contained important new information on the improved nuclear capability of the Soviet air force in East Germany; its new fleet of bombers and twin-jet radar-equipped interceptors; the doubling of Soviet bomber strength and the creation of a new fighter division in Poland; over one hundred air force installations in the USSR, GDR and Poland; the organization, bases and personnel of the Soviet Baltic Fleet; and installations and personnel of the Soviet atomic energy program. In the era before spy planes and spy satellites (the first U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union did not occur until July 1956), this intelligence was of particular value to a West still ignorant about much of the capability of the Soviet armed forces. 13

One of the messages intercepted in the Berlin tunnel revealed the existence of a Soviet agent working for British intelligence in Berlin, but it was not until 1961 that evidence from the Polish SB defector Michał Goleniewski identified the agent as Blake. 14Blake was sentenced to forty-two years in jail but served only five before escaping from Wormwood Scrubs with the help of three former inmates who had befriended him, the Irish bomber Sean Bourke and the peace protesters Michael Randle and Pat Pottle. On October 22, 1966 Blake knocked a loosened iron bar out of his cell window, slid down the roof outside and dropped to the ground, then climbed over the outer wall with a nylon rope ladder thrown to him by Bourke. Hidden in the Randle family dormobile, Blake was driven to East Berlin, where a fortnight later he was joined by Bourke. Once in Moscow, Blake and Bourke rapidly fell out. Blake writes in his memoirs that, “Arrangements were made for [Bourke] to return to Ireland.” 15He does not mention, and may not have known, that on the instructions of Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD, Bourke was given before his departure a drug designed to cause brain damage and thus limit his potential usefulness if he fell into the hands of British intelligence. Bourke’s premature death in his early forties probably owed as much to KGB drugs as to his own heavy drinking. 16