Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| At the end of my medical and psychological tests I was drugged and hypnotised, and finally informed that I had passed the examination with flying colours. Andrei told me that I had done very well, and now had a new entry on my personal file, which would do me a lot of good. I listened with great interest and anticipation as Andrew told me with a laugh that I was a clinically recognised, controlled psychopath. I was shocked, to be associated with all those terrible criminal psychopaths in recent British criminal history, but Andrei explained that this was not what was meant. The word ‘controlled’ meant only that I could switch off my conscience and not be plagued by feelings of guilt, remorse or shame, which might, it was feared, compel me into going back to England and confessing all. The KGB management had an innate fear of defectors, and was very conscious of what had happened to Nikolai Khokhlov, the KGB assassin in West Germany who had been sent to kill two emigré Ukrainians with a gas gun. After his first murder he had knocked on the door of the second target, confessed all, and asked him to call the police to come and arrest him. Since that embarrassing disaster the KGB had not employed other Russians for such tasks. As Andrei explained, Russians are a superstitious race and, combined with their Orthodox religion, are plagued with a conscience destining them to hell if they do anything wrong.
When I remarked that the psychological diagnosis sounded terrible, Andrei insisted that, on the contrary, it was not possible to have a better assessment in the file for ‘our sort of work’. He explained that henceforth the KGB would have no problem assigning such jobs because I would go through with them and never suffer a pang of fear or conscience, either at the time or later. ‘Being a controlled psychopath only makes you a very cool customer, as you British would put it’. This verdict rather reminded me of Sean Connery’s portrayal of James Bond, a perfect portrait of a conscience-free spy. Undoubtedly my excitement came from the adrenalin rush I get from going into dangerous situations, and acknowledged that I was indeed obsessive about injustices, real or imagined, very vengeful, and prepared to go anywhere and do anything to get even. However, I was not hot-blooded and, as the Mafia is reputed to say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I never met Philby formally but I did bump into him once at the Hotel Ukrainia where he was collecting some English papers and magazines, kept for him for him there at the hotel kiosk on a standing order. We eyed each other warily, but said nothing. When I asked at the kiosk for some English magazines, of the kind I had seen him collect, I was told there were none left for sale, and all had been reserved, unavailable to the general public, and kept under the counter. Nevertheless, I did benefit from Philby’s cast-offs, and his copies of The Times with the crosswords filled in. I also received, through the KGB, his old Times Literary Supplements of which he lent me a huge stack of back numbers, and these became my main reading matter while in Moscow. My dream was that one day a copy of The Times would be brought to me with the blank spaces where Philby had been unable to solve the clues. I fantasized that by hook or by crook, I would find the answers, even if they took me an entire day, and quietly return the paper to him, thereby ‘wiping his eye’. Unfortunately my ambition was never realised and I was told by our mutual handler that Kim used to pick up the paper, turned straight to the crossword and fill it in almost immediately, often while talking simultaneously about his day’s diary of engagements. He would be listening to Nick at the same as doing the crossword, and this so impressed him that Nick asked me to check the crossword and see if it had indeed been completed corrected. Clearly he suspected that Philby had just filled it in with gibberish, which was typical of the KGB, but unfounded. Once, when asked by Nick how he could complete such difficult puzzles so quickly, with only half his mind on the task, Philby had said that he had been doing them for so long that he recognised the various compilers, whom he now regarded as old friends. He claimed he could identify each from the very first clue, and this advantage helped him sort out the answers. He was, of course, a supremely clever man. The plan for me to take over Philby’s training responsibilities came to nothing, chiefly because of the extraordinary events that overtook Kalugin. As far as I was concerned, Kalugin had been posted, somewhat unexpectedly, to Leningrad, thus depriving me of a useful supporter at court, but behind the scenes there were some dangerous manoeuvrings that I only became aware of when, during the course of my psychological tests in the autumn of 1979, I was asked some very odd questions about my relationship with the counter-intelligence chief. Had I taken money abroad for him? Did I know of any foreign bank accounts held by him? Had I signed any chips for money that I had not actually received? These queries made no sense to me at the time and of course I maintained that my friendship with Kalugin was perfectly proper at all times, and that he had never asked to me do anything for him abroad on the sly. I did not connect this particular line with Kalugin’s departure from Moscow, but it later emerged that his political activities had made him very unpopular with the KGB’s senior management, and he had fallen out with Vladimir Kryuchkov. Typically, Kalugin’s dissent had been investigated as possibly evidence of something much more sinister, and I must have looked like a link to the west. In the end, of course, Kalugin retired from the KGB in February 1990, and in September the same was elected to the Duma, as the member for Krasnodar, and an outspoken critic of the system. Finally he emigrated to the United States and was convicted in his absence of treason, a completely trumped-up charge manufactured by his many enemies. However, as far as I was aware, the atmosphere in Moscow had deteriorated, and when I went back to Sofia I found myself disconnected, suspended from further operations until the KGB mole hunters had been satisfied. Although this was an uncomfortable few months, with little money, I did have Nellie to share the hardship with, and I was always confident that, once the enquiry had been completed, I would be cleared and given another assignment. However, this turn of events had been unsettling, and I scarcely knew how to interpret the apparently contradictory signals. On the one hand I seemed to have been accused of infiltrating the KGB, and maybe colluding with Kalugin, whereas I had also been asked to take Soviet citizenship, the implication being that I might not be able to leave the country again. Chapter V Australia My visit to Australia in October 1978, which lasted until April 1979, on one of my last missions for the KGB, was memorable, not least because I learned that my method of acquiring and travelling on false passports was rather more efficient than the KGB’s. By that time I was experienced in operating under several different identities. The Second Chief Directorate had issued me with a French Canadian passport in the name of Jean-Jacques Baudouin which was for use only in Moscow, initially when I was targeted against two British girls, but I returned it at the conclusion of each assignment. I think it had been stolen some time in 1974, but it was unconvincing, not least because I was described as being five feet five inches tall, blue-eyed with blond hair, and I was supposed to it to pursue VERA. Nevertheless, despite these discrepancies, I also used it to attend a World Organic Chemistry conference, which was part of my cover although knew absolutely nothing about the subject. I could find no books in the field, but I did have a friend, a blonde Intourist guide whom I had picked up at a hotel in Moscow. Our friendship had started very casually, until she had invited me back to her flat where I had been introduced to her your son. Later, after he had gone to bed, and she had explained that her husband was in prison for black-market offences, and I stayed with her for several nights. She was very well connected among the university staff in Moscow, and she knew an academic who was a chemistry expert. The friend turned out to be very knowledgeable, and she gave me a smattering of the science, allowing me gain a grasp of the subject as I lay between them. Our relationship continued until the guide’s husband was released from prison, and I made one last visit to her apartment to give her son a state-of-the-art video game that was unobtainable outside the hard currency shops from which ordinary Muscovites were excluded. On that occasion her husband had welcomed me into their apartment like a long-lost brother and we had gone to the country for a barbecue and day of picking wild mushrooms. It was a lovely, unforgettable day and made me appreciate how delightful ordinary Russians can be, in contrast to the hustlers and careerists who dominated so many of the Soviet institutions, the KGB included. Nowadays, of course, such leeches are to be found in the criminal, mafia gangs that prey on foreign visitors, but the warmth and generosity of the orfinary folk match any welcome anywhere else in the world. I also had six other genuine British passports, including one in the name of John Arthur Phillips, with a Bulgarian passport in the same name, but that identity was for use only in Bulgaria. In addition I collected quite a few other identities issued to me by Marcel for mercenary jobs, for I never went on more than one mercenary job with the same identity. My usual alias, as supplied by the KGB, was ‘Raymond Everett’, whose passport application in Australia had been verified by a respectable English businessman, a certain John Freeman. I had adopted this unusual methodology because I had no confidence at all in the original Everett passport that had been forged by the KGB, and supposedly had belonged to a child who had died during the Second World War. Even the KGB had little faith in it because I was instructed to dump it once I had used it to reach Auckland via Tokyo on Japanese Air Lines, and to fly on to Australia on the Everett birth certificate only. Naturally I ignored these orders but in Sydney I had to go through Australian immigration, where I acquired an entry stamp on the phoney Everett passport. Fortunately the official merely noted some details from it, and then waved me through. I knew that if he had been equipped with an ultra-violet scanner the rather crude forgery would have been spotted instantly. Indeed, the principal objective for my visit to Australia was to acquire a further identity and establish myself as an Australian citizen because I was concerned that ‘John Freeman’, the big game hunter from Africa, was becoming a little too notorious among the ladies of the American diplomatic community. One of my tasks during my travels was to acquire authentic passports for use by other KGB agents. This procedure required some skill, but I was adept at it and during my visit to Australia I made twenty separate applications for different passports, of which I collected twelve and gave them to my KGB handler in Canberra, with the other eight going directly to other addresses, or were collected by others. At that time I was living in Sydney in two places under different identities, both supported by passports, in the names of Freeman and Everett. My method of applying for passports under false names, was to telephone the issuing office with a chasing enquiry after two or three days, and arrange for a note to be attached to the Passport Office file, requesting that the passport be sent another address as the applicant was about to go away on a trip. This was a useful way of covering one’s tracks, and allowed me to carry on my business undetected. Certainly I was never caught, although following Mitrokhin’s disclosures some enquiries were conducted in Australia, and one of my contacts, Margaret, was interviewed by the authorities. Mitrokhin’s version implies that I just went off with $8,000 by various routes just to spend months in New Zealand and then moved on to Australia just to besiege a girl with a moustache, so she would sign my passport photo, but the truth is rather different. The entire mission cost the KGB around $23,000, with some $8,000 spent on airfares. Margaret is the manageress of a travel agency based at an office very close to the flat I was renting, and it was through her that I made most of my plane reservations. Our relationship was strictly business, and legitimate, and I never needed her to support my many passport applications which depended on Forsyth’s system. I would go to a town where a young child had died and photograph the local landmarks so as to a good background to support the eventual ‘legend’ used by a KGB spy to back-stop his identity. These were the Soviet ‘illegals’ whom I also helped in advance of their mission when, prior to their main assignment, they would travel to New Zealand to become acclimatised and gain a proficiency with the language. Then they would move on to Australia and settle somewhere like Bondi Beach where there was a local Russian Jewish community. In my case, John Freeman rented an apartment in North Bondi, while Everett maintained a flat on the beach! The passports were for sixteen year-olds but the applications were to be taken up for eighteen and nineteen year-old year graduates, often from Moscow University, who would then enrol in suitable courses, such as Russian language and literature in Australia. Occasionally there were requests for passports for older people, sometimes up to the age of fifty, and doubtless the older ones were for future ‘marrying Romeos’. In many cases, the prior research on who was dead had been completed already, but even then I visited the relevant town to check if the boy’s family was still living in the same family home. In such circumstances it is quite impossible to guarantee the security needed by the illegal, so I always looked for a fairly common name, often associated with orphans and illegitimate children given to institutions by their single mothers. I learned that the person previously employed on this not especially demanding task had been lazy and had simply visited the nearest cemetery, usually close to the local bus or railway station, taken the details of two or three children, often the first that had come into view, nearest the gate, and that was all I had to work on. I would rarely use these names and instead I would research the local Catholic children’s home, and then visit the nearest cemetery. I went everywhere to find he right names and research their backgrounds. Sometimes I did this in a tourist bus, accompanied by an unsuspecting Margaret and we would stop at restaurants and meet people, developing good contacts while simultaneously strengthening my own legend. Invariably at any stop there would be a whole troupe of passengers wandering off all over the place, perfect cover for drifting into cemeteries with a couple of carnations. I could ask locals, who might also be on the bus as internal tourists, who would be happy to chat about ‘whatever happened to Mrs Musslewhite?’ Often there would be folk travelling home who were only too happy to chat about their neighbours, all good background for building up a legend. Understandably the KGB did not want to send a Russian there to undertake such work as he would never have gained the confidence of such people. Nor would the KGB allow a member of the local rezidentura to do it as there was a fear that it might give a potential defector too much information, perhaps enough to secure a deal at some future date with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Such fears were far from groundless, following the defection in 1954 of Vladimir Petrov from the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Whenever I was seconded to other KGB departments for temporary assignments it was made clear to me that everything I learned on these posting was not just secret, but reserved for specifically that department only. When my handler said I was to be attached to a particular department, he never told me anything about the future job, because he personally knew nothing, and when I returned on completion no-one ever showed any curiosity about what I had been doing or where I had been. This was a very strict application of the ‘need-to-know’ principle, so when I returned to Canberra and reported to my handler with whatever passport I had obtained, I followed the instructions I had received in Moscow by placing the passport in a strong brown envelope, sealing it with Sellotape, and then signing across the seals. This meant that even my handler had no need to know the identity that eventually would be attached to the photograph. Nor was the hand-over a simple procedure, for it was accompanied by the usual tradecraft of a signal at a designated site, followed by a rendezvous at a prearranged meeting place, or merely a dead letter drop. In either case, it was highly efficient. On one occasion, as described inaccurately by Mitrokhin, I was faithful to my cover to the point that I took temporary refuge in a Salvation Army hostel. The real reason for this was not because I was truly destitute, but because I had applied to the British High Commission for a new passport in the name of John Freeman, claiming that the original had been lost when my wallet had been stolen in Sydney, together with all my travel documents. I needed a new passport because my Freeman original was in Moscow, and anyway did not contain an entry visa. I had also ditched the unsatisfactory Everett passport, and reporting a theft was the most expedient way of obtaining an authentic replacement, and explaining its lack of an entry stamp. To make the request authentic I checked into the hostel, where I received a new valid passport. Ostensibly this John F. Freeman was a businessman, a partner in the firm based in Accra, Ghana, and I was able to use the new passport to draw some thousands of dollars from a bank account in Senegal and give myself a measure of security that was profoundly lacking in the Everett document. The incentive for the unplanned identity switch were the notes taken upon my arrival by the immigration officer, for I was concerned that the slightest check, perhaps on the number, with the authorities in England, would reveal it to be a forgery. Why travel on a dodgy false passport when the real thing is available? My mission to Australia was not restricted to manufacturing false identities, and I undertook several other tasks, including making some very sensitive enquiries about individuals who, for one reason or another, had lost contact with Moscow. Some were genuine Australian citizens who had simply moved homes and not given a forwarding address, and of these a few were people running safe houses, boarding houses, retired Romeos, or former Eastern Europeans who had escaped from Communism and needed to be reminded of their relatives still behind the Iron Curtain. My job was to track such people down because they were not allowed to retire, duck down and disappear. I merely made inquiries and, when successful, relayed the information to Moscow by means of secret writing in the regular mail sent to a specific address. My return to Moscow from Australia proved to be quite eventful as I was given a further mission on the way back. I was to stop off in Singapore and make contact with a woman working at the German Embassy who was of interest to the KGB. Once again, I found my quarry and completed my assignment as instructed, but there was an incident that made me concerned about my future. I had been waiting for my new girlfriend in a local bar when I noticed that I had become the object of some attention from a group of what looked to me like about ten extremely tough Australians, real descendants of Ned Kelly. These were no sophisticated diplomats, of the kind one might expect to meet in a Commonwealth country, but more resembled squaddies, perhaps troopers of the Australian SAS, who had me in their sights. Had word circulated too widely about my activities? Were their glances towards me an indication that I might be under surveillance, or maybe that that I was becoming unnecessarily paranoid? It occurred to me that if I was right, it was time to move on before I pushed my luck too far, and if I was wrong then I was reaching the end of my usefulness by imaging spooks around every corner. Either way, I was approaching middle-age and burn-out, and this encounter with Crocodile Dundee and his mates prompted me to begin to think seriously about changing my life. Chapter VI London In the autumn of 1979, having been twice offered the prize of Soviet citizenship, I had flown to Sofia, only to be recalled to Moscow to undergo a cross-examination at the KGB headquarters. It became clear to me that I was the interrogators objective, but their true target was Oleg Kalugin. I was certainly not going to participate in any such exercise and when I made this clear I was allowed to return to Bulgaria, although I now realised that I had no future in Moscow, and probably not much in Sofia, so it was time to leave. I had really fallen in love with Nellie, and I had no wish to continue screwing my way across the world. What had seemed such an attractive way of life five years earlier was now an increasing burden, to the point that I was beginning to lose interest in sex. I felt that the KGB had taken me in the prime of my life and had abused my body to the point that I was almost worn out. I was exhausted mentally too, and I was also conscious that I was in danger of becoming one of the best-known KGB agents in the world. A couple of incidents, in Khartoum and Singapore, had persuaded me that the CIA probably knew precisely who I was, and I was not so foolish as to think that my activities could be expected to continue uninterrupted forever. I had received a couple of warnings, and although I thought I recognised the signals, the KGB had seemed impervious to them. They wanted to exploit my remaining energy and vitality, and their shopping-lists seemed to be growing longer. The problem was, I had not negotiated a retirement clause in my non-existent contract of employment, and I knew that the moment I voiced my unease I would be regarded not just as suspect, but possibly as a potential embarrassment and adversary. In those circumstances I was not entirely confident that the KGB would allow me to catch a flight home. Hitherto the KGB must have been sure of my commitment becuase they had known I was a fugitive who had nowhere else to run, but the situation in London had improved, or so I had thought. Perhaps a little too optimistically, I believed that with Moody and Virgo in prison, no English court could rely on their investigation to convict me of any crime. My optimism on this point was to prove unfounded. I had also thought that the new Commissioner, Sir David McNee, who had been brought down from Scotland in 1977 to continue Mark’s reforms at the Yard, might be expected to take an interest in my case, but this too turned out to be a forlorn hope. McNee, a Glaswegian who had never served in London, and therefore had been uncontaminated by working at the Yard, was known as ‘the Hammer’ and, as implied by his nickname, was thought to be a hard man. Bob Mark had initiated the clean-up, but he had been appointed an assistant commissioner in the Met, from Leicester, back in 1967, and therefore must himself have known of some of the shenanigans going on inside the CID. I had expected that McNee would be interested in my dossier and that it might represent a strong bargaining chip. It was with these happy thoughts in my mind that I prepared to return to London and face the music, telling Nellie only the bare minimum about my determination to get back to England. It would be impossible for her to leave, and I knew the KDS would haul her in for questioning when I disappeared,, so it was in her interests that she should know as little as possible. Because she genuinely knew very little about my activities, and was absorbed by her own work at the Palace of Culture, her protests of innocence would have a definite ring of authenticity which any skilled interrogator would understand. As for the KGB, they would undoubtedly be primarily concerned, not with her, but with any knowledge I might have taken to trade with a western intelligence agency. Without any other information to rely on, the KGB would assume that I had become a defector and in those circumstances I would be a marked man. I should not be caught attempting to leave the country illegally and, once outside the Soviet Bloc, I would have to steer clear of anywhere with a large Soviet diplomatic community. Accordingly, my departure from Bulgaria was not entirely straightforward, although I had the benefit of two passports. One was a Bulgarian passport identifying me as John Arthur Phillips, born on 20 May 1926, but I had arrived in Sofia as ‘John Freeman’, with a three month visa valid until 24 April. It was this document that I used to try and cross the frontier into Romania, but I was turned back and told to obtain a visa. My second attempt to leave on a train to Trieste, was more successful, and having waved goodbye to Nellie at Sofia’s main train terminal, I travelled to Venice, where I contemplated my future in St Mark’s Cathedral. In the silence of that magnificent church I realised that this was the second time I had deserted the KGB. Whereas, on the first occasion, I had been provoked into leaving India because of the treatment Nellie had received from the KDS in Sofia, and had been able to justify my action, I knew that this time I had really burned my bridges. The KGB might have been tolerant of my first disappearance, but this time I could not count on Oleg Kalugin to bale me out, and I would be in serious trouble if I went back. London, I concluded, must be my objective. I was aware that there was, of course, the outstanding warrant for my arrest, now some eight years old, but I was also concerned about what news of my more recent activities might have reached MI5. There had been several defectors from the KGB and I wondered what lurid stories they might have passed on about the FCD’s English spy. I had charges to answer, but most could be dealt with, or so I believed. But what of any allegations concerning espionage? I had not worked against British interests, and had never compromised any classified information, so I felt reasonably relaxed about the prospect of any charges under the Official Secrets Act, but in the back of my mind there was a nagging concern about the Treason Act which referred to giving comfort to the King’s enemies and, as I recalled, was still on the Statute Book, along with arson in His Majesty’s dockyards, as a capital offence. As a precaution, and to bolster my dwindling funds, I called Barbara from Paris and asked her to send me some money so I could come home, but she was very insistent that certain things had happened, which could not be discussed on the telephone, that I should know about before I returned. They were, she assured me, extremely important, so we agreed to meet in Calais, but I was baffled to know what she had been talking about. I had plenty of time to consider the various options, and it occurred to me that perhaps our meeting might be a trap, either for the police to nab me in France, or an ambush by the press, or perhaps some other, even less palatable explanation. Accordingly, I wrote a final letter to Nellie in Sofia, which I knew would be intercepted by the KDS, and then set off for the ferry terminal. There I watched from a distance and saw Barbara arrive, and was horrified to see that she had brought our son Alex too. Our arrangement was that she should come alone, and as I scanned the other foot passengers, I thought I detected the telltale signs of surveillance. It seemed to me that there were too many people hanging around aimlessly, and my instincts told me the risk of meeting her simply was not worth it. Reluctantly, I kept them in view as they waited for me to turn up, and then saw them go back to the ferry for the return journey. I now contemplated the easiest and safest route back to London, to Dublin and then up into Northern Ireland or across to Liverpool, but this was a luxury I simply could not afford with my limited funds. Instead I took the next ferry to Dover, was waved through immigration with only a murmur of admiration for the number of visas in my passport, and then made my way to Portsmouth where I contacted my brother Leonard at his base at Middle Wallop. By the time I reached the bus station in Portsmouth I was in a poor state, having had my briefcase stolen on the ferry, and was exhausted from the nervous tension of the strange events in Calais and my easy entry back into the country. Happily my brother made me welcome and I stayed with him, his wife and two daughters while I recovered my strength and made contact through him with my mother in Romsey. She had been concerned about a rather nosy police family in a neighbouring house, so I kept away from the house and was reunited with her and my children at Leonard’s home. I remained ignorant of what Barbara had been trying to warn me about until I moved up to Sevenoaks where I stayed at a small country house hotel run by an old friend, a former CID officer whom I trusted implicitly. I arranged to meet Barbara again, and on this occasion satisfied myself that she had come alone, and there was no possibility of any entrapment or surveillance. She filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge about what had been happening in England over the past eight years, and told me that a private detective named George Devlin was anxious to trace me because he needed evidence to discredit my former colleague Ian Harley. Apparently Harley had worked on a case of a major property fraud in London, and Devlin’s client, a developer named Pineles, had been accused of making off with £15m and had engaged a well-known firm of solicitors, Noble & Co, and John Matthew QC, to represent him. According to Barbara, Devlin knew that I would be able to compromise Harley, and my witness statement had acquired a considerable value. Her purpose in travelling to Calais had been to convey Devlin’s offer, but the more I looked into the background, the less I liked the sound of it. Initially John Matthew had worked for the prosecution against Pineles, but later it seemed that when the case had been dropped Matthew had retired, gone into private practice and helped defend Pineles in a civil action to recover the lost millions. A hopelessly heavy gambler, reputedly in debt to some notorious loan-sharks, he was apparently keen to meet me in the hope of discrediting Ian Harley. But how had he linked Harley to me? The connection proved to be yet another hideous disappointment for me, for in a moment of indiscretion Matthew had let slip that when he had worked on the original case against me, Moody had shown him a previously undisclosed statement signed by Harley. This was a man who had been my close friend and neighbour, and named his son after me. To learn that Harley had secretly turned against me and taken Moody’s side was a devastating blow and ended what few illusions I had left about loyalty within the police. I had known Harley well, and had dug him out of trouble on several occasions, yet the man I would have trusted my life to had betrayed me. Worse, he had helped Moody and remained silent about having done so. I had well understood the savage ‘alpha male’ wolf pack syndrome where one-time colleagues could be expected to turn on me to demonstrate their own innocence, but this treachery was too hard even for me to stomach. Certainly Harley had let me down badly, and now he would figure prominently in my updated dossier, but I had too many other complications to deal with. In April 1980 I finally telephoned my solicitor, Ben Birnberg, and announced my intention to surrender to the authorities. My plan was to give myself up but make contact with MI5 to negotiate a deal in which I could receive an immunity in return for an account of my espionage over the past eight years, and a detailed statement relating to corrupt officers in the Met. However, making this proposal was not quite as easy as I had anticipated. Birnberg knew nobody in the Security Service, and the route to the new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, turned out to be far from easy. Armstrong had seemed the right person to go to because, constitutionally, he acted as the official link between the security and intelligence services and the prime minister, and he had the added advantage of having run the Home Office for the past three years as the Permanent Under-Secretary. This would have given him a good grounding in what had happened in the Met, and brought him into daily contact with MI5’s Director-General, (Sir) John Jones, who would have been quite unapproachable directly. At Birnberg’s suggestion we consulted Gareth Peirce, and she advised that we talk to the Observer, a paper that we presumed would be in touch with MI5 or the Cabinet Secretary on a regular basis. In the meantime Birnberg and I turned up one afternoon at the Old Bailey and announced ourselves to one of the clerks who seemed reluctant to take me into custody and suggested I return a few days later. Knowing that I had set quite a lot in motion, I persisted, and eventually a copy of the original arrest warrant was found, and I was remanded in custody by Judge Albert Clark to Brixton’s hospital wing to await news of MI5’s reaction. My only consolation was visits from Barbara, who was often accompanied by Barbara Windsor, the Carry On actress whose gangster husband, Ronnie Knight, was also on remand, awaiting trial for armed robbery. Much later, Knight, who also owned clubs in Soho, and his brother John were convicted of the famous 1983 Security Express robbery which netted their gang £6m. My offer to document my work for the KGB and reveal my dossier on police corruption was made to the Security Service but, to my surprise, it was turned down flat, without even an opportunity to show what I was prepared to trade. Only later did I learn that MI5 had gone straight to Scotland Yard to ask whether my allegations of widespread corruption within the CID could be true. Not surprisingly, my former colleagues condemned me as a fantasist, and I found myself facing a lengthy prison sentence with no chance of bail. My other option, of publicising my case, seemed fraught, but Jack Crossley of the Observer suggested another approach, this time through the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, and I was visited in prison by one of his reporters, Bill Thompson, to outline the material I could offer. Once again, the attempt failed, and I found myself the object of attention from the Yard with requests for interviews from detectives doubtless despatched by the new ACC, Gilbert Kelland. I learned that far from having fallen victim to the purges, eland had been instrumental in conducting them, and this was another good reason for me to keep my distance from the Yard. Much had changed in London during the eight years of my absence, and as a result of evidence from Jimmy Humphreys and another pornographer specialising in hard-core material, Gerald Citron, the lid had been blown off Moody’s activities. In May 1974, during one of the Mark purges, Citron had been convicted of possession of pornography and fined £30,000, but instead of paying up, Citron had fled to the South of France, leaving behind a lengthy statement about police corruption in Soho. Originally from Manchester, Citron had become a major supplier to the Soho market, and had paid off the Dirty Squad like everybody else. However, he had expected a measure of protection, and when Mark’s new regime began to raid premises assumed to be immune, all bets were off. Moody had been found to have had a half share in a porn shop in Walker’s Court, managed by one of Silver’s men, Joey Jones, and the number of number of people in the trade willing to implicate Moody and Virgo escalated dramatically. The imprisonment of Moody and Virgo in 1977 had transformed the CID, and even with the passage of time it is hard to exaggerate the impact their convictions had. Commander Virgo, for example, had served on Lord Mountbatten’s enquiry into prison security, following the escape of George Blake in 1966, and for years had exercised tremendous influence at the Yard and in Whitehall. It had been his evidence at DCI Vic Kelaher’s trial on conspiracy charges in September 1973 that had ensured his acquittal when three of his subordinates in the Drugs Squad were convicted of perjury. The picture that emerged of the Dirty Squad’s grip on the very trade it was intended to suppress had astonished even the most hardened and cynical. The Kelland enquiry showed that the Dirty Squad had been collecting £250,000 a year, and before he committed suicide in May 1975 the porn importer ‘Big Jeff’ Phillips gave lengthy interviews to the Sunday People which had published several articles detailing the symbiotic relationship between corrupt plain-clothes men and Soho’s vice merchants. Stories of parties, hookers, holidays and junkets were spiced with allegations of free cars and home improvements for detectives, and suddenly the rumours that had circulated for years were not only confirmed, but helped swing the pendulum of public opinion in the direction advocated by Lord Longford, who had chaired an enquiry into pornography in 1972. The question for me to answer, though, was whether this new environment would help or hinder my case. On the one hand the revelations added weight to my dossier on police corruption, but that advantage had to be balanced against the widespread belief that most of the Met’s CID had been contaminated, myself included. The most serious of the charges against me concerned my three meetings with Michael Perry, and with the maximum sentence being two years’ imprisonment on each charge of conspiracy, I was looking at a possible six years inside. The other charges were simply too spurious to be pursued. Robson and Harris had been convicted on the evidence of the tape recordings which would be used against me, but I realised that I would stand little chance of challenging their authenticity now that the Court of Appeal had ruled in favour of their convictions. Four forensic experts had shown the recordings to have been edited, but to declare the transcripts unsafe now would have far wider implications, and I knew such a strategy would be torpedoed at the outset. I also knew that I would be lucky to get an early dismissal on the grounds of entrapment, as this strategy had been deployed at the Robson and Harris trial, and the judge had ruled against the defence. I was to spend the next few months on remand in the segregated cells of A Wing in HM Prison Brixton, which I shared with Makki Hounoun Ali, the only terrorist to survive the SAS attack on the Iranian Embassy at Prince’s Gate in May 1980. Ali was one of six members of the ‘Mujahaddin Anafar Martyr’ who had forced their way into the building and held the twenty-six occupants hostage for six days before the SAS stormed the building and shot dead five of the terrorists. Ali only escaped with his life because in the confusion he had discarded his weapons and had mingled with the hostages as they had been bundled out of the burning building into the garden at the rear. The seizure of the embassy had been planned in Baghdad in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of Iraqis in the Iranian province of Arabistan, and they had intended to negotiate their release, and certainly had not anticipated the lethal intervention of the SAS. I was just preparing myself for my trial when I saw that The Fall of Scotland Yard by Barry Cox, John Shirley and Martin Short, which had been published in 1977 and contained a very distorted account of what purported to have been my corrupt activities, all highly prejudicial to my case, had been reprinted and rushed out to coincide with the publicity surrounding my unexpected reappearance in London. I had been shown a copy of the book in Moscow when it had been first released three years earlier, and as soon as I read the references to me I suspected that the authors had been briefed by someone keen to keep me out of the country. Most of the book concentrated on corruption at the Yard, but the version of my role was highly distorted and implied that I was a master criminal. A good example was the innuendo that on the night the Times story appeared, I had telephoned a criminal named Ronald Williams to intimidate him and ensure his silence. This was demonstrably untrue, but had been one of the charges produced at the committal proceedings, following the trawl through the underworld for other offences I might have committed. In fact Williams was a career criminal who had been one of Harley’s informants, and he had negotiated his release from prison on a Home Office license in return for his witness statement, made to one of the gullible country coppers, implicating me. As soon as he gained his freedom he went on a one-man crime wave and used his license as a get-out-of-jail-free card whenever he was arrested. Finally, when he was caught stealing the brass plate off a lawyer’s office the magic wore off and he admitted his evidence had been a manoeuvre to leave prison. One further charge documented in the book in some detail related to £15 allegedly received from Daniel Crouch, another of Harley’s informants who was a member of the gang known as ‘the Likely Lads’. Crouch’s evidence, as received by DCS Charles Naan of the Mid-Anglia Constabulary, was that he had paid me to make a traffic summons disappear, but once again, upon close scrutiny, his story disintegrated. The reality was that a police motorcyclist had given Crouch a statutory police form known as an HO/RT/1 (an abbreviation of Home Office/Road Traffic Act document 1) which required the recipient to present certain designated documents, such as a certificate of motor insurance or a driving license, at a name police station within five days. Detectives did not issue these forms, and they were processed exclusively by the uniformed branch. It turned out that Harley had been a police cadet with an officer named Shakespeare who worked in the processing department and occasionally they ran a little fiddle which enabled them to lose the process duplicate. One that copy had disappeared, the grateful recipient could ignore the summons and no further action would be taken because there was no record of a failure to produce the required documents. This was a scheme run by Harley and Shakespeare, but was nothing to do with me, and I had no knowledge of Crouch, who apparently ran a whelk stall on the Old Kent Road. Once again, the charge was based on fabricated evidence, and to make matters worse, the version in The Fall of Scotland Yard suggested that the Met detectives on the Williamson enquiry had failed to trace the motorcyclist who had issued the original form, whereas the country bumpkins had found him with a couple of hours. The implication was that I had somehow used my extensive influence among other corrupt officers at the Yard to suppress a vital clue that was uncovered by the swedes. Plainly, the tale was absurd, but the fact that it had reached the pages of the book showed that someone was quite serious about using any tactic to deter me from making an appearance. As for Crouch, I learned that he had been facing thirty charges of shop-breaking and had applied for bail. Surprisingly, his application had been granted and twenty-nine of the charges were dropped in return for his witness statement. In the light of the publicity the book attracted I successfully petitioned to have my trial moved to the provinces, and eventually I appeared before Mr Justice Angus Stroyan at Middlesborough Crown Court, where I was prosecuted by a Crown counsel named Riblin on three charges of having corruptly obtained £150 from a criminal. The person identified in the court papers was, of course, Michael Perry, and I was accused of having taken the money off him as a bribe to prevent him from facing a charge of theft in the Nuneaton case. The evidence was a tape recording made on 31 October, illegally, in a car, supported by two other transcripts which, in their right context, should not have been particularly incriminating. The crux of the case was that back in September 1969 Frankie the Barber had provided Perry with a completely bogus alibi for the Nuneaton case, and it had been Moody who had travelled to see the Warwickshire police to confirm that the Met had conducted the proper enquiries in Camberwell and established the bona-fides of the spurious JP. In retrospect it was obvious that Moody had made the journey to Nuneaton to protect himself because Frank Holbert worked for his friend Bernie Silver, and any detailed investigation of Holbert could spill over into what was happening in Soho and compromise Moody’s little enterprise. In effect Moody had covered himself and ensured that if anyone took any heat over the false alibi, it would be me. This became quite obvious, and explained why Moody had joined the Williamson enquiry, and why he had taken the trouble to take statements from the Warwickshire police in 1970 when that task ought to have been undertaken by officers drawn from provincial forces. The arrangement that had allowed the Williamson enquiry to proceed was Sir John Waldron’s insistence that only Met officers would interview Met detectives, leaving the outsiders, drawn from Birmingham, Manchester and other forces, to handle the provincial enquiries. Why had Moody taken it upon himself to break the convention and rush off to Nuneaton? The answer was now obvious, and Frankie Holbert, who supposedly had been acting as one of Moody’s informants since 1958, held the key, However, Frankie had died, supposedly having jumped off a balcony at the block of flats in which he lived in Deptford in November 1973, hours after he had been convicted on pornography charges. Did he really jump, or was he pushed? Personally, I had no doubt about what had happened because there were too many powerful people with too much to lose if Frankie had decided to start talking about police corruption. Moody had enriched dozens of very influential figures, inside and outside the Yard, and none of them could have wanted Frankie to start making statements He certainly did not possess the strength of character to kill himself and it did not take much imagination to think of the circumstances in which he could have been coaxed or coerced up onto a roof and then shoved over the edge. It was certainly one of the most convenient and timely deaths of the era, and it had occurred to me that a similar fate could await me. If this sounds fanciful, I reminded myself that I was accused, by men making hundreds of thousands of pounds, of having received £50 from a known criminal in a car. Moody was a dangerous man, with powerful friends, and this knowledge had helped keep me away from England for eight years. Thus, when I came to trial, Moody was still in prison, Frankie the Barber was dead and Michael Perry would be facing a perjury charge if he failed to stick to his assertion that he had paid me £50 in October 1969, followed by another £50 a month later, for what had really been Moody’s mischief. My case got off to a bad start when my counsel, (Sir) Ivan Lawrence QC MP, failed in his application to have the fourteen tapes excluded from the prosecution’s evidence. Plainly the recordings had been made illegally, and those presented were not even the originals, but Lawrence’s submission failed to impress the judge, and I lost confidence in him. This was such a fundamental plank of my defence that I reckoned I might just as well conduct the rest of it myself. Five of the charges were dropped, but I was convicted on the remaining two, relating the allegation that I had extorted £150 from Perry, and was sentenced to two years. In court to hear the verdict were a couple of Russians, who I assumed had turned up to see if there was likely to be any embarrassing revelations about my past contacts with the KGB, so they must have been relieved when no word of that aspect of my past was mentioned. After sentencing I had just six weeks to serve so, after a brief spell at Durham, I was sent to Rudgate open prison near Newcastle, where I became acquainted with Joe Kagan, who offered to make contact with the KGB for me, and then finally was transferred to Ford open prison for release. My past soon caught up with me because I was approached by a firm of solicitors anxious to gather evidence about a currently serving detective, a chief inspector, who had attempted to extort a large sum from a property developer in Kensington. One of the parties had fled to Grasse in the south of France, and the tenacious George Devlin had been retained by John Matthew QC to go in pursuit of my old colleague Ian Harley and two former detectives. The offer made to me was to pay for my appeal if I supplied enough information on Harley, and may be set me up in business, but I was not interested. However, my other approach was, so I thought, rather more promising. It seemed that the Hertfordshire Police had never quite given up their interest in corruption in the Met, even though their contribution to Operation COUNTRYMAN had been ridiculed as the futile efforts of provincial flatfoots seeking to root out bad apples in London’s CID. I was invited to prepare a lengthy statement, describing my encounters with senior officers such as Gilbert Kelland, who had been appointed Assistant Commissioner (Crime) in 1977. I was able to give a detailed account of the darker side of my ex-colleagues to the head of the Hertfordshire CID, who was backed by his Chief Constable when the time came to negotiate an immunity for my evidence, which eventually amounted to a statement of 260 pages. My agreement, endorsed by the DPP and the Attorney-General, was to absolve me of involvement in any crime, short of violence, and in return I was entirely candid in naming those whom I knew to have been on the take. I was always somewhat sceptical about what this enquiry would achieve, and I was proved to have been quite realistic, because all that I accomplished was the lifelong enmity of the Met which was now run by the very people I had compromised. Not surprisingly, Scotland Yard took every opportunity to deride my testimony and portray me as a fantasist, and almost the only person to fall victim of my dossier was Ian Harley, the Camberwell detective who had been the architect of most of my problems. I was always puzzled about why the Security Service never bothered to interview me, after I had served my sentence, but the truth was to emerge when Tom King’s Parliamentary Committee investigated the background to Vasili Mitrokhin’s defection in June 2000. Mitrokhin had been aggrieved at the way he had been handled following his defection in 1992, and Tom King had criticised the officers who had never bothered to pursue the leads I must have represented. Naturally I was one of the first to buy a copy of The Mitrokhin Archive, but I was disappointed by his account of my adventures because it was so fragmentary and inaccurate. There I learned that my KGB codename had been SCOT, which in Russian means ‘swine’ or ‘brute’, and that Nellie had been ‘an agent of the Bulgarian intelligence service’. While the information about my codename might have been true, it was the most outrageous calumny to accuse Nellie, with whom I had been reunited in 2000 when she finally reached England, of having had any relationship with the Bulgarian intelligence service. On the contrary, she had been a victim of their harassment and later was to prove her loyalty and commitment to me by becoming my wife. Almost as soon as I had left Sofia Nellie had been visited by two KDS officers who had demanded to know where I was, and she had told them, quite simply, that I had gone to England. Soon afterwards they had returned, and on this occasion Nellie had shown them my letter from France in which I had confirmed my intention to return to London. Most likely they already knew the contents, as mail from the west was routinely intercepted by the KDS, but instead of being hostile, the officers had suggested that she might like to go to England and persuade me to return. Nellie had turned the idea down, so the KDS had resorted to other tactics, recruiting one of her friends, Vanga, as an informant in November 1982. None too subtly Vanga had taken a close interest in Nellie and she had realised her motives instantly. However, it was only when I unexpectedly resumed contact with Nellie, in a telephone call a month later, in December 1982, that she had anything to conceal. I flew in to Sofia on 16 December, to be reunited with her, and over the next ten days I told her the full truth for the first time, and she learned of what I had been up to during the eight years of my association with the KGB, of my police background, and my trial and imprisonment. Truly she had no inkling of any of it, but the news had been a terrible shock for her so when I left for the airport on Boxing Day I suspected I might never see her again. Curiously, the KDS appears not to have discovered my visit to Sofia until after I had left for, once again, two officers had turned up rather too late, anxious to know why I had returned. Equally inquisitive was Valentin, my old handler from the Soviet embassy, whose unexpected appearance proved that the KGB had not lost its interest in me. I only heard about this unwelcome attention much later, but I refrained from contacting Nellie because to do so might have placed her in danger. Indeed, I did not hear from her until 1990 when, without any warning, I received a birthday card postmarked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Although the KDS had banned Nellie from any foreign travel, the collapse of the Communist regime meant the restrictions were lifted, so she had taken the opportunity to go on a university exchange and stay on the campus in Newcastle. I was unaware of this, and heard nothing more from her until the middle of September 1999, immediately following the Mitrokhin disclosures. She had heard the story in Sofia where I had acquired some celebrity, and having contacted the Daily Express, which had published a photograph of me outside my flat in north London, had written a letter addressed simply to ‘8 Holly Court’. Thanks to the efficiency of the post office, this had indeed reached me, and the next month I had been reunited with Nellie in Sofia. Indeed, I visited Bulgaria again in November, and again in December when, at long last, we were married. On 15 January we came back to England as man and wife, and went to live with my younger brother in Nottingham. Chapter VII Mitrokhin My exposure as a key KGB agent for eight years, as disclosed by The Mitrokhin Archive, at least served one purpose, which was to embarrass MI5, the organisation that had failed to take me seriously, but when I read the pages describing my exploits, my jaw dropped and my blood pressure rose. Much of the information in the account could not have come, as alleged, from the KGB’s archives, and in the text it was hard to distinguish between what was really Mitrokhin’s own version, and what had been inserted by his editor, Christopher Andrew. Although one of the leading intelligence historians of the period, and the author of Secret Service in 1983, Andrew had come to his subject late and his original doctorate had been gained in studying the history of football. He was widely criticised when he belatedly drew the defector Oleg Gordievsky into collaborating with KGB: The Inside Story, a supposedly comprehensive history of the Soviet intelligence services published in 1990, which was heavily dependent on secondary sources, some of them quite unreliable. Indeed, Gordievsky’s role had not been that of a co-author, but really as a source of confirmation for much of what had been written already by Dr Andrew (who speaks no Russian), long before the defector had joined the project. When Mitrokhin turned up in London determined to publish his archive, speaking no English, and with no understanding of what was already in the public domain in the west, he clearly needed considerable support to transform his incomplete manuscript and numerous volumes of disjointed hand-written notes into a comprehendible narrative. The task was mammoth and was divided into what amounted to four separate publications: a British and almost identical American volume, a French (Le KGB contre l’Ouest:1917-1991) and German (Das Schwarzbuch des KGB) version of the same with additional local cases; a KGB Lexicon published three years later to give an insight into terms and phrases used by the KGB, and a final volume which was to be heavily delayed. Apparently Mitrokhin had been appalled to see that the American edition of his beloved Mitrokhin Archive, which he had spent a quarter o a century compiling at immense danger to himself, had been entitled The Sword and the Shield, with the authors described as Christopher Andrew, in bold letters, ‘with Vasili Mitrokhin’ in smaller letters underneath. Understandably, Mitrokhin had felt aggrieved at this presentation of his life’s work, and complained vociferously. When he was interviewed by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee he made it clear that he ‘was not content with the way in which the book was published’ and ‘wished he had had full control over the handling of his material’. Although the co-authors may have fallen out, my concern was the accuracy of what had been written about me, and the doubt about precisely how much of the pages devoted to my exploits really had originated from the KGB’s plundered files. As well as the two opportunities for error, when Mitrokhin copied his extracts, and then when his notes were translated into English, there was also the possibility that the original material in the KGB files were inaccurate. Certainly the information concerning me was quite detailed, but that did not make it right, and some of it was undoubtedly plain wrong, but how much? I was fascinated to learn that my Raymond Everett alias had been codenamed FORST in the KGB’s archives, but was that really true? There was no way of verifying much of the information without access to the original records. Whilst few could disagree that Mitrokhin’s goldmine represented an unprecedented windfall for western intelligence agencies, it required very careful handling while it was being refined and transformed from his raw material into form that could be easily understood. Mitrokhin had lost his access upon his retirement in 1984, shortly before the world of counter-intelligence was to be turned upside-down by the decision of Aldrich Ames, in April 1985, to betray the CIA’s list of moles in Moscow. Thus Mitrokhin was never in a position to learn about Ames’s treachery, nor to compromise the KGB’s star spy in the FBI, Robert Hanssen, who had first volunteered information to the GRU in New York in 1979. After selling three batches of classified documents to the KGB’s rivals, he had withdrawn from the scene until he re-established contact with the Soviets, in Washington DC, in June 1986, but this time he dealt with the KGB, and even then he went to considerable lengths to conceal his true identity and even the fact that he was an FBI counter-intelligence officer. Thus when Mitrokhin retired in 1984 he knew nothing about either Ames or Hanssen, but nor did he ever see the file of the KGB’s other important spy, John Walker, who had been handled by the 16th Department, a self-contained, specialist unit within the FCD concentrating on signals intelligence. Unusually, the 16th Department maintained their own compartmented archive to which Mitrokhin never had access. Accordingly, although Dr Andrew included plenty of references in his book to Ames and Walker, they were actually completely unknown to Mitrokhin. Hanssen, of course, was not to be caught until February 2001, long after the publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, and there was no mention of George Trofimoff either, who was not to be arrested until June 2000. That, of course, is not to diminish the significance of Mitrokhin himself, or his documents, and there is no question that it was a tip from him that finally entrapped Robert Lipka, the KGB’s nineteen year-old spy inside the National Security Agency who had been active for two years until he left the NSA in August 1967 to attend college, having been paid $27,000 for more than fifty bundles of secret documents he had been asked to take to the shredder. In short, Mitrokhin was of great historical interest, but he did not actually identify any of that most valuable of commodities, spies currently active. Lipka had cut off all contact with the KGB in 1974, and Trofimoff had retired from the US Army Reserve in 1987. Both men received long prison sentences after they had been videotaped boasting of their espionage to undercover FBI Special Agents, but Mitrokhin’s evidence on its own fell far short of what was required to secure criminal convictions. It required extremely sensitive handling, and the omission of Trofimoff’s case from The Mitrokhin Archive was simply that, at the time of publication, the investigation was still ongoing. In common with most intelligence agencies, there is often an element of both fact and fiction in the KGB’s files, and this does not necessarily mean that the files were compiled by case officers with malevolent intent. There can be differences in perception, and the lines between an unconscious source and a willing agent is sometimes hard to determine, and even harder to explain if a subject is attributed a codeword which might imply he or she was a fully-fledged spy, whereas they might not have been anything more than a casual acquaintance. In my case such delicacies did not concern me because of course I had always been a willing agent from the outset. However, my doubts about the veracity of Mitrokhin’s version increased when I learned that of the thirteen footnoted source references to me, all from more than forty paragraphs devoted to me in ‘Volume 5, Chapter 14’ of the defector’s notes, none were available for independent scrutiny, either in their original form or as photocopies. Then there was the issue of the chronology described in Mitrokhin’s account. According to his version, I had marched into the Soviet embassy in Rabat to offer my services, but that was untrue. Did this assertion appear in the KGB file or in Mitrokhin’s notes, or was it supposition on the part of Professor Andrew? Then I had been recruited as the KGB’s ‘first British Romeo spy’ and ‘posted to Bulgaria’ to cultivate suitable targets, with ‘the wife of an official in an FRG government department’ as my ‘most important sexual conquest’. In reality, of course, I had met Nina entirely casually, while I was recuperating from malaria, and the idea that I had been deployed to seduce her was laughable. But again, was this material reproduced faithfully from Mitrokhin, or was it another example of Dr Andrew joining up the dots and drawing a completely false picture? The other incidents described by Andrew were equally misleading, and his version had me blundering around Australia, whereas I completed the mission without any mishaps. With one finger in the source notes, and the other following the text, I read that I had been a corrupt detective ‘in the pay of criminals such as south London gang boss Charlie Richardson’, and that while awaiting trial I had gone ‘into hiding for several months’ and then had used a false passport in the name of John Freeman, supposedly my ‘girlfriend’s mentally handicapped brother’ to flee abroad, finally approaching the KGB at the Soviet embassy in Rabat in August 1972. Every detail of Mitrokhin’s version was an absurd travesty, and I certainly was never in hiding before I left for Morocco. Indeed, I had been in constant contact with my colleagues at Camberwell police station who, with typical generosity, had arranged a regular whip-round for me, organised by Colin Crisp. Several officers, including Michael Smith and Peter Lang had been frequent visitors at my house, and of course during those two and a half years awaiting trial I had also been in direct touch with my co-defendants, Robson and Harris. Although I had briefly known Eddie Richardson as a young man, Of course, I had absolutely no connection with the Richardson gang beyond working on the edge of the police investigation, like many hundreds of other Met detectives. Of course I did obtain the Freeman passport, but not until long after my departure from England, a journey for which I had used my own passport. As for Barbara’s brother being mentally handicapped, the idea is absurd. He spent twenty years working for British Rail and then had another career with Westminster City Council, a total of forty years of exemplary service without a single of sick leave, and certainly no mental problems. For good measure, Dr Andrew claimed that my photo in the Freeman passport application had been ‘authenticated by the mistress of a member of the Richardson gang’. Was this embellishment in Mitrokhin’s files, or had it been added by Dr Andrew? Another bizarre assertion was that I had ‘made the dramatic claim that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence, regularly bribed Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Met “to smooth over certain unpleasantness”. Once again, this was sheer invention, only on this occasion I could see how it might have been possible for some ignorant KGB officer to have confused DS Harley’s name with that of the Labour politician, although I thought it unlikely. In any event, the context was completely wrong, although I do admit that in Moscow I often sounded off about the injustice I had suffered at the hands of Moody and his cronies. Certainly Moody was corrupt and was shown at his trial to have been bribed by many, but as far as I knew there had not been any politicians involved. Nevertheless, this example strongly suggested that poor transliteration may have been a factor in building a ridiculously inaccurate account of my activities. No wonder that Mitrokhin himself had been so disappointed with the eventual publication. He had wanted his life’s work to be an unchallengeable history of Soviet misdeeds, not a compendium of inaccurate tales of espionage. The most wounding of all the tripe attributed to Mitrokhin was the assertion that Nellie had been ‘an agent of the Bulgarian intelligence service’. This was not only a complete fabrication, but was really very hard for Nellie to endure for she had been victimised by the KDS because of her relationship with me, and for her to be smeared in this way was intolerable. The impact on her, and her family in Sofia, a city then recovering from years of Communist repression, had been devastating. In the post-Zhivkov era, it is hard to imagine a more damaging and potentially dangerous charge than one of having collaborated with his hated security apparatus. Although Zhivkov himself had been deposed in 1992 and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, he had been in power since 1954 and there were plenty of people about with scores to settle, real or imagined. To be labelled a KDS agent in the atmosphere prevailing at the time was extremely hazardous, even for one’s friends. Irritatingly, Dr Andrew agreed under pressure from lawyers to remove this passage from future editions when Nellie complained, but never apologised for what was an entirely gratuitous falsehood that had created appalling problems for her family. His reluctance to correct an obvious injustice, and his refusal to show us Mitrokhin’s original notes left me deeply suspicious of the authenticity of the rest of The Mitrokhin Archive. Chapter VIII HOLA
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