Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The miserable sequel to Philby’s Izvestia interview did little either to persuade Philby that the KGB any longer had a serious use for his talents or to assist in his rehabilitation. When Oleg Kalugin met him for the first time at the beginning of 1972, a month after Philby’s marriage to Rufa, he found “a wreck of a man:”

The bent figure caromed off the walls as he walked. Reeking of vodka, he mumbled something unintelligible to me in atrocious, slurred Russian.

Over the next few years Kalugin and other Young Turks within the FCD gradually succeeded in rehabilitating Philby, using him to devise active measures and run seminars for young officers about to be posted to Britain, Ireland, Australasia and Scandinavia. Kryuchkov and the FCD old guard, however, remained suspicious of Philby and refused to allow him into Yasenevo. 11Philby’s lack of status continued to rankle with him. He liked to give Western journalists the impression that he was Colonel—or even General—Philby of the KGB. In reality, he remained agent TOM.

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the mass expulsions of September 1971, most of the London residency’s agents were put on ice. The Centre calculated that the residency would be unlikely to resume normal operations, even on a reduced scale, until mid-1974 at the earliest. 12

The much reduced number of KGB and GRU officers in London found themselves under considerably tighter surveillance. On September 17, 1971, Abdoolcader, the KGB agent in the GLC motor licensing department, was arrested after a tip-off from Lyalin, who had been his case officer for the previous two years. In his wallet was a postcard addressed to Lyalin, giving the latest registration numbers of MI5 surveillance vehicles. Abdoolcader was jailed for three years. 13

With the previous resident, Voronin, declared persona non grata and known intelligence officers refused British visas, a junior Line KR officer, Yevgeni Ivanovich Lazebny, who had the cover position of security officer at the Soviet trade delegation and had somehow escaped expulsion, was made acting resident. During his fourteen months in charge, Lazebny tried to preserve his cover by keeping his office at the trade delegation and visiting the embassy each day to supervise the work of the residency. 14

Though out of his depth when it came to running intelligence operations, Lazebny insisted on elaborate and time-consuming security precautions which further complicated the life of the residency. No one was allowed to enter the residency wearing an overcoat for fear that it might be used to conceal material being smuggled in or out. Briefcases, bags and packages were also forbidden, and the shoes of operations officers were X-rayed for bugs or any hidden compartments. All mail and furniture bought or repaired locally were also X-rayed. The embassy administrative officer, M. V. Loshkarov, was disciplined for placing a bulk order at a London store for electric lamps which Lazebny feared might be bugged. Oil cans, batteries, even knots in woodwork, were regularly inspected to make sure they contained no bugs or secret compartments. 15

At the end of 1972 Lazebny was succeeded as resident by the Latvian Yakov Konstantinovich Lukasevics (alias “Bukashev”), 16who continued to insist on elaborate security procedures. In 1971-2 the residency received agent reports that MI5 had a source either among the officials of the Soviet trade delegation or among the inspectors of industrial equipment. Though a time-consuming hunt for the traitor continued until 1976, it yielded no result. It was eventually concluded that the agent reports might have been planted by MI5 to distract the residency from its operational priorities. The residency’s fears of British penetration had, however, some foundation. An extensive network of bugging devices was discovered at the trade delegation, which contained outposts of both the KGB and GRU residencies. 17

Following the 1971 expulsions, Cuban and east European intelligence services were asked by the Centre to help plug the intelligence gap in London. 18The KGB also sought to compensate in some degree for its diminished residency by expanding its agent network among the diplomats and staff of the London embassy. By 1973 nineteen members of the embassy were listed in Centre files as KGB agents, among them the ambassador’s deputy, Ivan Ippolitov. 19Some of the KGB officers who were expelled from, or denied entry to, Britain, were redeployed to Commonwealth capitals with substantial British expatriate communities—notably Delhi, Colombo, Dar-es-Salaam, Lagos and Lusaka. 20The files seen by Mitrokhin record few major recruitments of British agents by the redeployed officers. In 1974, however, three operations officers in an east African residency—S. S. Sarmanov, G. M. Yermolev and N. T. Krestnikov—were given awards for recruiting a British journalist, TOM, and his wife IRENE. TOM and IRENE, however, proved of limited usefulness. Early in 1976 TOM moved to Asia and was briefly used to report on other Western residents. He failed, however, to gain access to any classified information and in April 1976 Kryuchkov decided to break operational contact with him. 21

THE FIRST SECTION of the London residency to resume something like normal operations after the 1971 expulsions, albeit slowly and on a reduced scale, was Line X (ST). During 1972 plans were made to renew contact with six of its most highly rated agents: the veteran Melita Norwood (HOLA) in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, first recruited in 1937; ACE, an aeronautical engineer; HUNT, a civil servant recruited by Norwood; YUNG, an aeronautics and computer engineer; NAGIN, a chemical engineer; and STEP, a laboratory assistant. 22Though Mitrokhin’s notes give only an incomplete account of how the six agents were reactivated, it is clear that it was a lengthy business, probably preceded by prolonged and painstaking surveillance to ensure that none was under MI5 observation. Contact with HUNT was not re-established until 1975, and even then it was thought safer to use a French agent, MAIRE, rather than an operations officer from the London residency, as his controller. 23

When contact was renewed with Melita Norwood in London in 1974, it was discovered that she had retired two years earlier. Since she no longer had access to classified material, regular contact was discontinued. HOLA, however, retained a high reputation in the Centre as probably its longest-serving British agent with a highly productive record which included intelligence on the British nuclear program. She seems to have remained throughout her career a true believer in the Soviet Union. During a visit to Moscow with her husband in 1979, forty-two years after her original recruitment, she was offered a further financial reward but declined, saying she had all she needed to live on. 24

By 1974 Line X at the London residency had nine operations officers (seven fewer than before operation FOOT), headed by the deputy resident, Oleg Aleksandrovich Yakimov, and had successfully resumed contact with most of the Line X agents put on ice in September 1971. 25The most productive of the reactivated agents was, almost certainly, the aeronautical engineer ACE, recruited in the late 1960s. 26By the time he died in the early 1980s, ACE’s product file consisted of about 300 volumes, each of about 300 pages. Most of these 90,000 pages consisted of technical documentation on new aircraft (among them Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011), aero-engines (including Rolls-Royce, Olympus-593, RB-211 and SNEY-505) and flight simulators. ACE’s material on the flight simulators for the Lockheed L-1011 and Boeing 747 were the foundation for a new generation of Soviet equivalents. ACE also recruited under false flag (probably that of a rival company) an aero-engine specialist codenamed SWEDE. Remarkably, ACE was paid a monthly salary of only 225 pounds, raised to 350 pounds in 1980. 27