Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| As for the British Embassy itself, it was accommodated in an elegant mansion, owned in Czarist times by a wealthy merchant, on the Moscow River, overlooking the Kremlin on the opposite bank. The building itself was an architectural gem, but it was totally unsuited to be an embassy, apart from its prestigious position. The fabric was poorly maintained, and was so riddled with bugs that the Foreign Office security branch had installed a ‘bubble’, a transparent sound-proof box made of perspex in which sensitive conversations could be held without fear of being overheard, or intercepted by the kind of sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices that the visiting ‘sweepers’ would discover from time to time. No sooner had a microphone been discovered and removed, a replacement was installed by one of the many locally-employed UPDK staff. As for its geographic location, it was an easy target for the KGB because it was a low structure, dwarfed by other buildings nearby from which the KGB could monitor its radio traffic. Thus, despite its wonderful appearance and outlook, the site was, from an espionage viewpoint, a security disaster. Better still, for the KGB, there was only one entrance and exit, so all arrivals and departures could be logged easily.
Quite apart from the success achieved in 1955 with Vassall, the SCD had entrapped the ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, in 1968, who had fallen for Galya, his enticingly attractive Russian maid, thoughtfully supplied by the UPDK. An experienced career diplomat who had served previously as ambassador in Brazil and Iran, Sir Geoffrey had bedded Galya in his private apartment while his wife was away and, when he realised his folly, had been withdrawn hastily to London and replaced before any pressure had been applied to him. His indiscretion had been hushed up, but it had wrecked the end of what otherwise would have been a faultless career. Far from discouraged by this episode, the SCD’s Second Department, then headed by Rem Krassilnikov, had completed a study of the current ambassador, Sir Terence Garvey, and his staff of forty diplomats, and found what it hoped were a few vulnerabilities. Krassilnikov had a full head of snow-while hair and looked, as his nickname of ‘the professor’ suggested, more like a genial academic. He had learned his trade in the First Chief Directorate, in Canada and Beirut, and had been responsible for running a mole inside the RCMP Security service, James Morrison, codenamed FRIEND. Although fired from the RCMP for fraud, Morrison was the subject of a lengthy molehunt codenamed LONG KNIFE but, thanks to Krassilnikov’s consummate skill as a spymaster, was not caught until he made a televised confession years later. However, Krassilnikov’s advancement within the FCD had been handicapped by his Jewish parentage, and when he had been denied a rezidentura of his own he had switched to the SCD where he had been coached by Philby and Blake on the techniques employed by his British adversaries. Rem was himself the son of a Soviet intelligence officer, and his first name was an acronym for the Russian phrase ‘world revolution’. His devotion to the Party can be judged by the fact that his wife was named Ninel – ‘Lenin’ spelt backwards! Altogether, Krassilnikov was a shrewd old bird who knew just what he wanted from the British. My target, I was informed, was a woman, codenamed VERA, and my task, in January 1975, was to establish whether VERA was a genuinely a lonely figure, or whether she had some more sinister role. One evening she had made a reservation at the Opera, and my instructions were to approach her during the interval in the bar, masquerading as a French Canadian professor of organic chemistry who was visiting Moscow for an academic conference. We started to chat and I realised she was a very decent young lady, a junior diplomat on her first overseas posting. I walked her back to her apartment building, and agreed to meet me again. We soon got to know each other quite well, and during one of our dates I bought her an amber bracelet, paid for by the SCD. She was slim, with a good figure and it was not long before she was inviting me back to her flat, but I deliberately kept my distance because I had no wish to take advantage of her, whatever the wishes of the SCD, and I grew to like her as a social equal who did not deserve to be exploited. Certainly she was vulnerable and isolated, but that was all the more reason to treat her with respect. My only difficulty was explaining all this to the SCD who saw such people as opportunities, targets and victims, not unlike the hard men from the Yard, and my remedy was to extract myself in a manner that the Soviets would recognise as final, by telling them that VERA was a virgin, and absolutely determined to remain so until she was married. I was uncomfortable working with what I referred to contemptuously as ‘the Second Division’ and my discontent mounted when I heard about some of the other projects they had in mind for me. One suggestion was that I should mingle with groups of English tourists to verify precisely who they were. At the time Dzerzhinsky Square supposedly was being inundated with offers to spy from visitors. According to the SCD, almost every tour group included someone who would try and establish contact with the KGB and volunteer ro become an agent. Allegedly the numbers had grown to such levels that they had become unmanageable and the SCD was anxious to weep out the suspected agents provocateurs before any time was wasted on them. Were they decoys or truly authentic? I thought it highly unlikely that the KGB was being overwhelmed by wannabe spies, and I certainly saw no role for myself in this exercise. Indeed, the last thing I wanted was to mix with English tourists and risk being recognised. Accordingly, I rejected the idea, as I did the SCD’s alternative project, to help stamp out some of the rampant black-market activity. The SCD complained that illicit money trading and icon smuggling had reached epidemic proportions, and wanted to know whether this was mere opportunism or if it was being run by organised crime. My intended task was to pose as an innocent tourist, hang around the foreign currency bars and infiltrate the gangs, but again I refused the proposal as such operations were too risky for my taste or talents. Chapter III Moscow After my lengthy vacation with Nick I returned to Moscow for more tradecraft training, and then was given some unarmed combat training from a harmless-looking man named Andrei who told me how to kill someone by squeezing their Adam’s Apple, and blocking their windpipe. He also showed me other lethal techniques, such as pressure to the carotid article to stop the blood supply to the brain, and the use of a plastic bag over the head to suffocate them. My tutor Andrei told me that his father had headed the KGB’s elite Spetnaz special forces, and now lived next-door to Leonid Brezhnev. According to his reputation, he had been sent to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to help round up the counter-revolutionaries suspected of undermining the regime. Andrei was fluent in English and Chinese, and demonstrated a talent for card-tricks. He also led me to believe that he had been taught at some stage by Kim Philby, a disclosure which followed a discussion we had when Andrei corrected my pronunciation of the word ‘often’. He preferred ‘offen’, a toff’s pronunciation which, he explained, had been recommended by Philby, whom he regarded as a master of the King’s English. I was amused by this episode, wondering how long anyone with such an accent would last in south London’s underworld. Later I would spend a lot of time with Andrei, and even went on an assignment with him, meeting him in Finland. He was always tremendous company, and we travelled across the Baltic together, visiting Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It was on this trip that he challenged me about my alias of Eddie Herbert, and asked why Nick always called me John. I replied that John was merely a codename, just as Nick was not really Viktor’s true name. Obviously Andrei knew Nick’s true name, and pursued the matter no further. The incident had no adverse impact on our relationship and, soon afterwards, when I expressed some boredom at the constant round of drinks, salt fish, more drinks, visits to battlefields and monasteries in Estonia, he asked the KGB in Riga to provide some female company, and I was supplied with a very attractive Estonian girl to keep me entertained. Later I was introduced to Valentin, a KGB officer who had served in London but, like Nick, had been expelled. Like the retiree codenamed ARTHUR, he took me through the principles of secret writing, finding dead-drops, surveying for signal sites, and handling money and passports. Valentin, of course, was not his real name, and I soon learned that he was Vladimir A. Loginov, a former KGB boxing champion who had been a boy soldier during the siege of Leningrad and had witnessed the most terrible of battle scenes. He been sent on an ill-fated mission to Mexico to foment social unrest. That assignment had ended in disaster, so he had learned English for a new posting to London. There he had been declared persona non grata in 1968 when he had been caught hanging around with a colleague near MI5’s secret garage in Barnard Road, Battersea, making a note of the index numbers as the watcher vehicles came in and out. Evidently MI5 had spotted Loginov and had tipped off the police, who had sent a patrol car to arrest the two officials from the Soviet Trade Delegation. According to Loginov, there had been quite a scuffle in which he had floored two of the policemen, but they had taken their revenge when he had been confronted with a whole crowd of their colleagues back at Battersea Police Station who had given him a real seeing to. Despite this incident Loginov bore no grudge, and joked that the KGB rezidentura in London at that time included “Longenough, Strongenough and Goodenough, all characteristics of the Russian penis!” Valentin accompanied me to his home in Leningrad, a flat overlooking the racetrack, and regaled me with harrowing stories about his experiences during the war. He also introduced me to a subordinate who looked very like Vladimir Putin, who showed me around the city. It was here that we seriously discussed my future, and I decided to throw in my lot with the KGB. Thanks to Nina, or maybe the bald-headed barman in his ridiculous costume who had introduced us, I had become a person in the eyes of the KGB, and its personnel were treating me as a human being. I was no longer a stranger in a foreign land, and not just an interesting encyclopaedia on the subject of police corruption in London. I had achieved some status among the KGB, and when I talked about the future, especially with Nick, he was at pains to set my mind at rest. Money had been sent to my mother, and had been delivered in person in cash. No, Nick could not tell me the precise sum involved, but the payment had been authorised at a very senior level. I had not seen my family for three years, and Nick was willing to arrange for my mother to bring my children out to Morocco so we could discuss our plans. Barbara also received an unexpected cheque for £1,500, thus easing another domestic problem, and allowing her to bring my son Alex to visit me in Morocco. Did she want to join me and live in Africa? As it turned out, she had acquired a new boyfriend in England who was willing to act as father to my son, and had no wish to live abroad, but Nick helped me handle these issues. While in Rabat with Barbara I was able to solve a little mystery that had bothered me ever since my conversations with Nick at the Black Sea villa. He had seemed to know rather more about me than I had anticipated, and had sprung Ian Harley’s name on me. Upon my return to Morocco I had found that my motor caravan had been removed from the car park where I had left it, and when the owner gave me a description of the two men who had removed it weeks earlier, I immediately recognised Marcel and Gold Tooth. Obviously the two KGB men had taken it to tear it apart, which is what would have been required to find my carefully hidden correspondence with Ian Harley. It would have taken a chain-saw to reveal the caravan’s secrets, and the thought of some of my most valued possessions, including my father’s fishing-rods, being ripped apart by that pair had infuriated me. In fact I was so angry that I had stormed off to the Soviet Embassy in Rabat and made a scene at the gate, demanding to see Gold Tooth, but of course I was refused entry. However, I must have made quite an impact because Nick later chastised me for creating an incident, and warned me to keep away in future from all Soviet diplomatic missions. Better still, he promised the KGB would replace the missing vehicle. If it had not been for Nina I might have been on my way back to Morocco, sucked dry of my knowledge of police corruption and thrown out to fend for myself, probably ending up in dead on some half-backed mercenary job in a fly-blown corner of Africa. Instead, the KGB had won me over and, by treating me with respect, had gained a potentially valuable asset. Instead of working with an organisation that had taken the attitude: ‘he must have done it so, if there isn’t any evidence let’s fit him up’, I was collaborating with a huge, truly international structure which employed armies of psychiatrists and psychologists, summing everyone up and deciding how best to approach a particular problem, identify their strengths and weaknesses. As I was to find out, the KGB was absolutely thorough in everything it did. The files I read in preparation for pitching a target were compiled with meticulous care and had been drawn from filched medial records, former boyfriends, indiscreet colleagues, open sources and every other kind of databank. They had been to college in Connecticut, had one brother, a family dog and a father whom she had pissed off years earlier. She was bright, in her early twenties, probably naïve, posted to a new embassy, and vulnerable to an approach from me, once I had been briefed. The people I was working with were the cream of the Soviet crop, well-educated, dedicated and a tremendous eye for detail, all determined to leave nothing to chance. When I had been I had been debriefed about police corruption I had anticipated a rather shallow discussion about training, police flats, parties and that other unspoken part of the job. Who was sleeping with whose wives? Divorce was an occupational hazard in the Met and the policy of packing the police families together into block accommodation inevitably led to extra-martial affairs among those working on shifts. I expected the KGB would want to know about how the Met was organised, but I never anticipated the dozens of detailed questionnaires and the interest that would be taken in the backgrounds of particular individuals. Nothing was too trivial to be included in a subject’s file, and by the end of the process I felt as though my brain had been emptied of all memory. The KGB was not just interested in the personalities involved in corruption, but they wanted to understand how the entire system worked. I soon found myself giving what amounted to lectures on the skills required to rig the jury, nobble barristers, influence judges, put in a word with the DPP, negotiate with a defence solicitor, leave a loophole in the evidence for a defendant to wriggle out of, or fortuitously find an especially incriminating piece of evidence at the last moment. Nowadays the police are obliged to disclose exculpatory evidence, but in south London we routinely withheld any awkward witness statement that might benefit the defence. Almost everyone in the criminal justice system, at every level, had an interest in winning convictions and banging up criminals, but on the way there were dozens of opportunities to be exploited, and over the past decade I had come across most of them. These ranged from the unopposed bail application to the tip to the defence counsel, and they were all described in my KGB talks. Bowing to popular demand, I also included a lecture on the role of prostitutes in high society, and described how men from the top draw in England seemed to enjoy the company of ladies of the night. Once again, my remarks must have resonated with my audience, for the KGB had always been fascinated by the scandal that had rocked the Macmillan government in 1963. The Profumo affair had centred on the clandestine affair conducted by the Secretary of State for War with a beautiful call-girl, and had resulted in the suicide of Stephen Ward, the society osteopath and intermediary who had introduced them. The Soviet interest had focused on the assistant Naval Attaché, Eugene Ivanov, who had also fallen for Christine Keeter, and although the entire business had been the subject of a report written by Lord Denning, many mysteries remained unsolved. Ivanov had been a GRU military intelligence officer, so the KGB had acted as spectators throughout, but had been intrigued when, during the Heath government, two of his ministers, Tony Lambton and Lord Jellicoe, had resigned because of their relationship with a well-known madam, Norma Levy. Not only was I well up to speed on these events, but I was well aware of how Norma had not only been allowed to operate by the police, and knew that her husband had been a Yard informant for years. As might be imagined, the KGB furiously wrote up their notes as I regaled my audience with tales from the underworld and British politics. The one person I had first-hand knowledge of was, of course, Tom Driberg MP, by now a senior and influential figure in the Labour Party whom I knew to be a predatory homosexual who, it seemed to me, based on my own contact with him at Bow Street, was not only complteley corrupt himself, but had subverted plenty of others, including the MP who ahd come to his rescue after I had arrested him for gross indecency. How difficult would it have been to entrap him while he had been cottaging in some public convenience? I thought I made a strong case for exploiting him and his very extensive social and political connections, but it turned out that the KGB knew all about him, and so did MI5. It seems that Driberg had been recruited as a source inside the Young Communist League at a very early age, in fact while he was still at school, by the Security Service, but Anthony Blunt had revealed his role to the Soviets during the war, and so he had been chucked out of the Communist Party without explanation. Some years later, after the defection of his friend Guy Burgess, Driberg had turned up in Moscow to write Guy Burgess: A Portrait, a short and rather favourable biography of the notorious homosexual, and doubtless the KGB had been given the opportunity then to apply pressure on him. Later it was rumoured that he had collaborated with the Czech intelligence service, so by the time I came on the scene to make my contribution his file in Dzerzinshy Square must have been bulging. Whatever the consequences, I never had any reservations about recommending Driberg for the full KGB treatment, and I remain convinced that he fully deserved whatever blackmail he had to endure, if that is indeed what happened. It may be that the KGB found my allegations about Moody, Virgo and Drury quite hard to believe, but when this trio was arrested my stock went through the roof. Of course, I had no idea that the Met would ever go after the heart of the corruption in the Yard, but I had been writing anonymous letters to various MPs and others, whenever the opportunity had arisen, to alert people to the scale of the problem. I have no idea if my bombardment of allegations had any effect on the decision to investigate the top level of London’s CID, but I can say that the KGB was hugely impressed when much of what I had detailed in my dossier emerged in court at the end of the inquiries. I had given chapter and verse on dozens of names, so whenever Jimmy Humphreys mentioned someone, the KGB already had many of the details. Indeed, in some ways the KGB was rather better informed about what had been going in at the Yard than the very policemen brought in to investigate the suspect detectives. I was tempted to speculate that perhaps the KGB had hoped to exploit Moody, Virgo and Drury for their own purposes, or maybe the KGB had been disappointed at not having capitalised earlier on what I had told them, but the only result I could discern was that my standing had increased considerably as a consequence of my very prescient, expanded dossier. Clearly my enhanced status meant they were not going to ignore my advice in the future. During my discussions with Nick we debated where I should be based in between my assignments for the KGB, and we both agreed that Bulgaria was the best option. I could either live elsewhere, and come to Bulgaria for my instructions, or I could live permanently in Sofia, but I was never offered a flat in Moscow. I came to the conclusion that the KGB was anxious to run their operations overseas with the minimal direct links to Dzerzhinsky Square, doubtless because of the need for ‘plausible deniability’ if anything went wrong during one of my more risky enterprises, but was also keen to have me on call, reasonably close by. Living in Africa did not appeal to me, but from what I had seen of Sofia and the Black Sea, Bulgaria had plenty to recommend it. There I would be entirely immune from arrest and as the Soviet ambassador was effectively the most influential person in the entire country, I could live under his protection, but away from the stifling supervision the KGB would have exercised in Moscow. Furthermore, Bulgaria was well positioned from my point of view, with good air links and easy access to Africa and the Middle East. With this plan approved, Nick agreed to arrange for me to meet Barbara in Morocco, and obtain all the required forms for my exit and travel abroad. Ultimately, as he accepted, I wanted to settle in an English-speaking country where I could be reunited with my family, although in the meantime my adrenalin personality craved the excitement of taking on the KGB’s assignments, not to mention the first-class international travel, all expenses paid, with unlimited free medical cover. Now more confident about my future, Nick set me a task I was not willing to fulfil. Apparently the KGB wanted to penetrate MI5, and wanted me to recommend a suitable candidate who could be indoctrinated while still at university and then sent to infiltrate the organisation. I had stressed, when accepting the KGB’s proposal that I should work against the CIA, that I would not act against British interests, and evidently the KGB did not consider a recommendation as an overt act in way I interpreted it. I probably could have come up with a couple of names, but I was conscious that the Soviets probably had more experience of long-term penetration operations than anyone else. Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross had all been recruited while still up at Cambridge, and the Soviets had been willing to invest long-term and wait for them to climb into positions of influence. While Philby and Cairncross had joined the Secret Intelligence Service, Blunt transferred from the Intelligence Corps to the Security Service, the only known hostile penetration of MI5. Apart from Blunt there had been once case, during the Second World War, of a CPGB member working as a secretary in the registry, but no action had been taken when she had been discovered, and she had been quietly dismissed. What Nick had in mind was a similar exercise, taking a suitable, committed candidate while still at university and grooming him (or her) for a career in the Security Service, encouraging the agent to gain promotion and acquire access to the organisations’ most treasured secrets. Whilst I had little doubt this was probably one way to breach MI5’s security, I was far from convinced the effort would be worthwhile. So much would depend on the chosen individual who, even assuming they sailed through the Positive Vetting screening procedures (as had every post-war spy of any significance), might not be prepared to go the distance, thereby wasting a very hefty investment. In my opinion, which I kept to myself, the KGB would have been better advised to subvert a Special Branch officer who might transfer across in the Security Service. As I was well aware, Met detectives were very susceptible to large bribes, and although the Branch men were somewhat detached from the rest of the Yard, they were all made from the same cloth. Why take years in the hope of placing a suitable candidate close to an MI5 recruiter when a serving Branch officer could be bought for a fraction of the price, and was already in an excellent position from which to manoeuvre himself into the Gower Street headquarters of the Security Service. My solution was to promise to consider the problem and make some suggestions to Nick, but in the event I allowed the project, or at least my participation in it, to run into the sand. This expedient avoided a potentially painful confrontation with my generous sponsors, and may even have served to delay what was in any event going to be a very long-term plan. |