Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

THOUGH MITROKHIN HAD unrestricted access to FCD files, their sheer volume meant that his notes on them are bound to contain significant gaps. The possibility thus remains that the KGB had important Cold War British sources not identified by him. It is unlikely, however, that there were many of them. Oleg Gordievsky has confirmed that during his posting to the London residency from 1982 to 1985, which included two years as head of Line PR and a few months as resident-designate, Line PR and, probably, Line KR were running no British agents of major importance. 78There remains the possibility of British agents recruited and run by residencies and illegals outside the United Kingdom 79—a list by Mitrokhin of KGB agents, contacts and “developmentals” (targets under cultivation) includes a tantalizing one-line reference to a British agent run from Karlshorst whose operational file in 1981 ran to fifteen volumes. 80

The most remarkable British agent identified by Mitrokhin outside the field of ST to have been recruited after operation FOOT was also run by Line KR outside the United Kingdom. Given the codename SCOT, he was a bent London copper: Detective Sergeant John Symonds of the Metropolitan Police, who became probably the most peripatetic of all the KGB’s British agents. 81The London residency, however, was able to claim no credit for his recruitment.

On November 29, 1969, the day that The Times published photographs of the footprints on the moon of Apollo 12 astronauts, it also carried a front page story headlined “London Policeman in Bribe Allegations. Tapes Reveal Planted Evidence.” Conversations secretly recorded by two undercover Times reporters were said to prove that Symonds and at least two other detectives were “taking large sums of money in exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence in court, and for allowing a criminal to work unhindered.” Symonds, then aged thirty-three, admitted to the reporters that he was a member of what he called “a little firm in a firm”—corrupt detectives in the pay of criminals such as south London gang boss Charlie Richardson. 82

While awaiting trial at the Old Bailey in 1972, Symonds went into hiding for several months, then fled abroad. His KGB file reveals that he used a passport obtained in the name of his girlfriend’s mentally handicapped brother, John Frederick Freeman, and had his passport photograph authenticated as that of Freeman by the mistress of a member of the Richardson gang. In his absence, the two other corrupt policemen identified by The Times were sentenced to six and seven years’ imprisonment. In August 1972 Symonds entered the Soviet embassy in Rabat, told his story, said that his money was running out and offered his services to the KGB. 83To be certain that his story attracted the Centre’s attention, he gave the name of a Special Branch officer guarding the defector Oleg Lyalin, and alleged that he was probably corruptible. Symonds also made the dramatic claim that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defense, regularly bribed Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Met “to smooth over certain unpleasantness.” 84Though Moody was later convicted of accepting huge bribes from the underworld and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, the allegation that Healey was involved in the bribery was wholly fraudulent. The Centre, however, took Symonds’s tall story at its improbable face value. 85

Symonds spent the next eight years as a KGB agent. Noting that he was “of attractive appearance,” the Centre decided to use him as its first British “Romeo spy,” using seduction and romance, rather than the traditional cruder KGB techniques of sexual compromise and blackmail, to recruit or obtain classified information from a series of female officials. In 1973 Symonds was posted to Bulgaria in order to cultivate suitable targets at Black Sea resorts popular with Western tourists. Symonds’s most important sexual conquest was the wife of an official in an FRG government ministry. Over the next few years he paid a number of visits to Bonn to continue the affair. Intelligence from Symonds’s German girlfriend in 1975 was considered so important by the Centre that it was made the subject of a personal report to Andropov. 86

Symonds was used by the KGB to attempt the seduction of female officials, mostly Western embassy staff, on four continents. His next assignment, after beginning his affair with the woman from Bonn, was to target women at American and British missions in Africa during the latter part of 1973. At the end of the year, however, he fell ill in Tanzania with what his KGB file describes as “tropical fever,” and had to travel to Moscow for medical treatment. As soon as he had recovered, Symonds was ordered to cultivate a member of the British embassy staff in Moscow, codenamed VERA, who had been observed going for long solitary walks in her spare time. Posing as Jean-Jacques Baudouin, a Canadian businessman attending the 1974 International Polymer Exhibition in Moscow, Symonds succeeded in staging an apparently chance encounter with VERA and striking up a friendship with her. Though Symonds’s file claims that VERA became “attached” to him and gave him details of her next posting as well as her home address in Britain, there is no indication that she passed on to him any more than unimportant personal gossip about some of her colleagues and superiors in Moscow and London. The Centre, however, considered her a potentially valuable source for identifying other, more vulnerable female targets in the British embassy. 87

In 1976, on KGB instructions, Symonds set out on a long journey which took him from Bulgaria through Africa and India to south-east Asia. In India he cultivated an English woman (codenamed JILL), an Israeli and at least five American women. In 1977, however, while in Singapore pursuing a secretary at a Western diplomatic mission who had been identified as a target for cultivation by the local KGB residency, Symonds believed that he had come under surveillance, took a flight to Athens and returned to Bulgaria. An assessment by Directorate K of Symonds’s work over the previous five years concluded that he had shown no sign of dishonesty in his dealings with the KGB, had obtained material “of significant operational interest” and—but for the fact that his existing travel documents had aroused the suspicion of Western security services—still had considerable potential as a KGB agent. At the request of Kalugin, the head of Directorate K, Kryuchkov instructed the Illegals Directorate to give Symonds a new identity. 88

The identity chosen for Symonds was that of a “dead double,” Raymond Francis Everett (codenamed FORST), an Australian who had died in childhood during the Second World War. 89On July 23, 1978 Symonds flew from Moscow to Tokyo en route to Australasia, carrying a forged British passport in the name of Everett, a genuine birth certificate in the same name and 8,000 US dollars. Once in Australia Symonds was to abandon the British passport and use the birth certificate to obtain an Australian passport in the name of the dead double. Symonds began by spending several months in New Zealand developing his legend so that, once in Australia, he could pose as an Australian who had spent some years in New Zealand. 90

In November 1978 SCOT traveled to Australia with a group of rugby supporters and began to cultivate Margaret, the manageress of a small travel agency, in the hope that she would provide the necessary reference for his passport application. Symonds’s cynical report on Margaret was probably typical of the way he had sized up the previous women he had been instructed to seduce. Margaret, he claimed, was tall, thin, plain, round-shouldered, had hair on her upper lip and was bound to be flattered by his attentions. Symonds pursued her with flowers, chocolates, presents and invitations to dinner. Unfortunately for Symonds, Margaret was honest as well as unattractive. When he asked her to act as a referee, she refused on the grounds that the law required her to have known him for at least a year. By now Symonds’s money had almost run out. Arrangements for him to receive more money via the Canberra residency broke down and his landlord locked him out when he failed to pay the rent. A female schoolteacher whom he persuaded to put him up also threw him out after a fortnight. At one point Symonds was reduced to spending several nights in a Salvation Army hostel. Eventually, with the help of a French bank in Sydney, he was able to withdraw 5,000 US dollars from a bank account he had opened in the name of Freeman (his first alias) in Senegal. 91