Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Despite the exclusion from Britain of known KGB and GRU officers, the KGB was still able to send Line X agents and “trusted contacts” from Soviet universities to Britain on scientific exchanges and for postgraduate or postdoctoral research in engineering and the natural sciences. Most went either to universities and polytechnics in the London area or to Oxford and Cambridge. 28“Targets of operational interest,” where it was hoped that KGB agents and trusted contacts could identify potential recruits, included Churchill College, King’s College, St. Catharine’s College and Trinity Hall at Cambridge University; Magdalen, Queen’s and Trinity Colleges at Oxford; King’s College, University College, the London School of Economics, the School of Oriental and African Studies and the School of Slavonic Studies at London University. 29

Some of the Soviet scientists who came to conduct research in Britain were KGB officers. In May 1975, for example, Dr. Hugh Huxley of the British Medical Research Council’s molecular biology laboratory at Cambridge invited Academician Frank, director of the USSR Academy of Sciences Biophysics Institute, to send a member of his institute to carry out research at the laboratory. Unknown to Huxley, the invitation was misappropriated by the KGB. The scientist sent to Cambridge was Valeri Vasilyevich Lednev of Directorate T. 30At about the time Lednev embarked on his British assignment, the head of Directorate T, Mikhail Lopatin, who had been in charge of ST collection in Britain in the mid-1960s, arrived in London to advise the residency on the expansion of Line X operations. 31

Though not comprehensive, Mitrokhin’s notes suggest that there were fewer new British Line X recruits during the 1970s than in the decade before operation FOOT. The earliest post-FOOT recruit definitely identified by Mitrokhin is CHRISTINA, who was recruited in 1973—probably in the Soviet Union. 32It is unclear from Mitrokhin’s notes whether four other Line X agents operating in Britain in the early 1970s were recruited before or after the mass expulsion of KGB and GRU officers. 33Because of the difficult operating conditions in London, at least six (probably more) Line X agents either met their case officers outside Britain or were controlled by other European residencies. 34

The most important British ST agent recruited during the decade after operation FOOT was, almost certainly, Michael John Smith (codenamed BORG), a Communist electronics engineer. 35The secretary of the Surrey Communist Party in the early 1970s, Richard Geldart, recalls Smith as an “out-and-out Tankie”—a hardline supporter of the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks: “Not to put too fine a point on it, he was the total nerd. There was socializing going on, but he was not part of it.” 36A Line X officer at the London residency, Viktor Alekseevich Oshchenko (codenamed OZEROV), made initial contact with Smith in a pub near Smith’s flat at Kingston-on-Thames after a trade union meeting held in May 1975 before the referendum on British membership of the EEC. On instructions from Oshchenko, Smith left the Communist Party, ceased trade union activity, became a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph, joined a local tennis club and—as his operational file quaintly puts it—“endeavored to display his loyalty to the authorities.”

In July 1976, helped by bureaucratic confusion in MI5, caused by the remarkable coincidence that the Surrey Communist Party contained another Michael John Smith, he gained a job as a test engineer in the quality assurance department of Thorn—EMI Defense Electronics at Feltham, Middlesex. Within a year he was working on the top secret project XN-715, developing and testing radar fuses for Britain’s freefall nuclear bomb. 37The KGB passed the documents on project XN-715 provided by Smith to N. V. Serebrov and other nuclear weapons specialists at a secret Soviet military research institute codenamed Enterprise G-4598, who succeeded in building a replica of the British radar fuse. Smith’s intelligence, however, seemed too good to be true. Serebrov and his colleagues were puzzled as to how Smith had been able to obtain the radio frequency on which the detonator was to operate. This information, they believed, was so sensitive that it should not have appeared even in the top secret documents on the design and operation of the detonator to which Smith had access. Armed with a knowledge of the radio frequency, Soviet forces would be able to create radio interference which could prevent the detonator from operating. One possibility which occurred to the specialists was that the frequency supplied by Smith might be merely a test frequency which would not be used in actual military operations. But they remained suspicious of the extent of the detailed highly classified information which Smith had been able to supply. 38

The Centre also seems to have been suspicious of the ease and speed with which a well-known pro-Soviet Communist had been able to gain access to one of Britain’s most highly classified nuclear secrets so soon after going through the motions of leaving the Party and switching from the Morning Star to the Daily Telegraph. Its suspicions that Smith’s intelligence on the radar fuse might have been a sophisticated deception seem to have strengthened when he told his controller in 1978 that he had lost his security clearance and, for the time being, could no longer provide classified information. (Though Smith did not realize it at the time, MI5 had discovered its earlier error and secretly informed Thorn-EMI of Smith’s Communist past.) 39

To try to resolve its doubts the Centre devised a series of tests to check Smith’s reliability. The first test, which Smith seems to have passed, was to remove two packets of secret material from a dead letter-box in Spain. The second, more elaborate check on Smith, personally approved by Andropov and termed in KGB jargon “a psycho-physiological test using a non-contact polygraph,” was conducted in Vienna in August 1979 by Boris Konstantinovich Stalnov and two OT (operational—technical support) officers. Stalnov began with a brief prepared speech, duly entered in Smith’s file:

I am personally satisfied with the way things are going and with our mutual relations and I am therefore extremely glad to congratulate you. From today you are a full member of our organization. This means that the organization will take care of you. Believe me, you will have gained friends who are ready to come to your help in any circumstances. Your participation and help to the organization will be duly recognized. The organization is based on two principles: voluntary participation and sincerity.

The first means that, having joined the organization of your own free will, you may leave it at any time if you think it necessary, without any [adverse] consequences for yourself, provided you give prior notice.

As for the second principle, sincerity, you must inform us of all details which directly or indirectly affect the interests of our organization. This is understandable as the security of both sides depends on it. Joining the organization is also in a certain sense a formal act. In connection with this I am required to put a number of questions to you. I regard this as a pure formality. You should do the same.

It will simplify the task and save time if you simply answer “yes” or “no.”

Smith was then asked over 120 questions and his replies secretly recorded. Subsequent analysis of the recording and Smith’s response to each question persuaded the Centre—doubtless to its immense relief—that he was not, as it had thought possible, engaged in a grand deception orchestrated by British intelligence. Though Smith had been led to suppose that the “psycho-physiological test” was a routine formality, it had never been used before by the KGB outside the Soviet Union. The Centre was so pleased with its success that it decided to use the same method to check other agents. It none the less decided to give Smith a third (and apparently final) test of his “sincerity” by instructing him to remove a container holding two rolls of film from a DLB in the Paris suburbs and to deliver it to a KGB officer in Lisbon. 40The KGB would doubtless have been able to detect any attempt by Smith or another intelligence agency to open the container.