Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| Part of my irritation at the references to me in The Mitrokhin Archive concerns the revelation, made to the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, that when the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, orignally had authorised the publication project in March 1996, he had imposed certain very strict conditions on the public release of the material where living people might be identified by name, noting that ‘it would be grossly unfair if unproven allegations were published with our agreement’. He was also emphatic that the decision to include any names should not be left to the Security Service. As a lawyer and a politician, Rifkind anticipated the impact of unsubstantiated accusations of espionage, and doubtless the publisher’s legal advisers would have given similar advice, but Rifkind effectively imposed a ban on naming individuals who had not been convicted of espionage. He was quite correct to do so, and he had been equally right to prevent MI5 from taking the initiative in denouncing individuals never charged with any crime. Within the Whitehall system, MI5 is a curious hybrid because although the organisation and its director-general are accountable to the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, they are not instruments of political power in the same way that the country's other intelligence agencies are. The Director-General of the Security Service heads a semi-autonomous body and has surprisingly wide discretion, within the terms of the legislation passed since 1989, to open files and conduct investigations without consulting ministers, and undertake independent analysis. This is in stark contrast to the relationship between the Secret Intelligence Service which responds to requirements set by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which then uses analysts from its own Assessment Staff to collate the product and distribute reports. It is in this rather unusual constitutional arrangement that ministers are necessarily hesitant about extending MI5 even greater freedom, and Rifkind had wisely anticipated the potential pitfalls of having the organisation sponsor, on behalf of the government, the identities of people named by a Soviet defector as traitors, or even entirely innocent targets of Soviet interest. If Mitrokhin had wanted to publish his book independently, without official assistance, he would have been free to do so, subject to the UK's laws of defamation, and the European Convention on Human Rights, but instead he had opted to collaborate with the government, which was an entirely different matter. Quite properly, governments are reluctant to be drawn into the libel courts, especially in cases where the principles of Crown immunity would not apply. Rifkind's wise injunction had been intended to protect the innocent implicated by Mitrokhin, and avoid legal controversy.
Somehow, as it turned out, Rifkind's prohibition had not extended to me, although I had not acted against British interests and, on the contrary, had been granted a formal immunity from prosecution by the Director of Public Prosecutions in 1984. Somehow this important detail also had been omitted from the final text of The Mitrokhin Archive, and I was thrown to the media wolves. I was especially irked by this uneven treatment because a Tribune journalist, codenamed DAN, was described as the London rezidentura’s ‘most reliable agent of influence during the 1960s’, yet his true identity was initially concealed, at least until some assiduous researchers challenged Dick Clements, a political adviser to the Labour Party leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Clements had edited Tribune for twenty years and, according to Mitrokhin, had been recruited by the KGB in 1959 and had done their bidding for years afterwards. With his wide readership and very considerable political influence, he had been regarded by the KGB as a vital asset, and MI5 of course would have been fully aware of DAN's real name and status yet, curiously, he had benefited from Rifkind’s ruling, whereas I had not. I had never been accused of espionage in Britain, or spying against British interests, yet here was someone said to have been paid by the KGB to publish Soviet propaganda, and had been protected. Like Richard Gott, the Guardian journalist exposed by Oleg Gordievsky in December 1994, Clements had peddled Soviet propaganda at the KGB’s request, but of course had never been in a position to compromise any classified material (and thereby breach the Official Secrets Act). Nevertheless, he did admit to having had meetings with Yuri Kobaladze, a senior member of the KGB's London rezidentura working under diplomatic cover. Clements and Gott had been ideologically inclined towards the Soviets, and the latter’s true role had been revealed in an article in the Spectator, based on Gordievsky’s information. However, in the case of Clements, MI5 must have known he was DAN, yet his name did not emerge until he was challenged by The Sunday Times and admitted having been in touch with the Soviets. The way in which The Mitrokhin Archive came to be published is quite extraordinary and the subsequent parliamentary inquiry offers a unique opportunity to understand precisely what happened. It is also an eloquent textbook account of how not to handle an important defector and his information, and reveals some astonishing examples of perfidy and ineptitude within the Security Service. The first politician to be informed about the existence of a potential defector codenamed GUNNER took place within a couple of weeks of Mitrokhin’s initial approach in Riga, with the SIS Chief, Sir Colin McColl, mentioning him to Douglas Hurd, the then Foreign Secretary. As well as having spent fourteen years as a Foreign Office diplomat himself, serving in Rome, New York and Peking, Hurd’s son Tom was then also an SIS officer, so the Cabinet minister knew all about that mysterious organisation referred to in Whitehall as ‘the friends’. Indeed Hurd, who has written several spy novels, had also spent three years as private secretary to Sir Harold Caccia, the FO’s Permanent Under-Secretary, and a former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, right at the very heart of Whitehall's intelligence system. Exactly what Hurd was told by McColl on that occasion is not recorded, but a man of his experience would have instantly grasped the implications, especially as Mitrokhin from the outset had made publication of his book a condition of his cooperation. Even at that time, with the Soviet Union in ruins and former intelligence personnel forming orderly queues outside American embassies in an effort to flee the chaos and trade on their knowledge, Mitrokhin must have stood out as a potential espionage coup. Hurd was told formally about the existence of the source codenamed GUNNER in August 1992, and two months later he gave his permission to the plan to exfiltrate Mitrokhin and his family to England in October, but the Prime Minister, John Major, was not informed about any of these events until January 1993, three months after Mitrokhin’s arrival, when he was briefed by McColl. None of this is unusual or improper, as the Foreign Secretary is routinely informed about SIS's work, and is required to personally approve individual operations where there is some risk involved, especially is there is a danger of political 'blow-back'. Long gone are the days of the infamous 'robber barons' of SIS who often mounted hazardous undertakings without any ministerial sanction, and in April 1956 even consented to sent a diver on a seccret mission under a Soviet warship, contrary to an express ban made by the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. The system of ministerial approvals subsequently introduced after the fiasco in Portsmouth, which resulted in the death of SIS's frogman, eliminated the 'plausible deniability' that had been so attractive to politicians, but there had remained, until the passage of the Intelligence Services Act in 1994, some protection in the well-established principle that as Britain did not acknowledge the existence of a peacetime intelligence agency, so ministers therefore were unable to respond to Parliamentary Questions on the subject. Granting Mitrokhin and his family British citizenship, and exfiltrating them 'black' from Latvia, was relatively low risk, given the Baltic state's new independence, but the entire undertaking nevertheless required Hurd's approval, and he granted it. My name first came to prominence the following month when the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, and the Intelligence Coordinator, (Sir) Gerald Warner, were briefed by SIS, and by the Director-General of the Security Service, Dame Stella Rimington, who discussed the British names in what had by now become JESSANT’s material. For operational reasons, SIS changed GUNNER’s codename once he had been resettled in Britain. Additionally, Warner, a retired senior SIS officer, briefed the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Rodric Braithwaite. Warner had joined SIS in 1954 and had served overseas in Europe and the Far East until 1976 when he returned to headquarters and served, until his retirement in 1990, as McColl’s deputy. As Intelligence Coordinator, Warner’s function was to advise the Cabinet Secretary on intelligence issues and oversee Britain’s intelligence-gathering organisation. The fact that he was placed in control of the publication project reflects the importance given to it in Whitehall’s secret corridors. As for Sir Rodric, he was a former ambassador in Moscow and an experienced diplomat, whose responsibilities as head of the JIC was to run the country’s analytical capability and set the requirements for the individual agencies. Usually a JIC Chairman would not be expected to be indoctrinated into the detail of every SIS operation, so his inclusion inside the Mitrokhin ring of secrecy is also significant as further evidence of the importance attached to the project. The issue that had arisen was, as Hurd's predecessor Malcolm Rifkind had wisely anticipated, how the British names mentioned by Mitrokhin should be handled in the book. The principal focus of MI5’s attention in early 1992 was Michael John Smith, a former member of the Communist Party who had been identified by another KGB defector, Viktor Oshchenko, as a spy whom he had run when he had been a Line X (science and technology) specialist based in London under diplomatic cover as a third secretary between 1972 and 1979. Oshchenko had defected from Paris to SIS in July 1992, and had named Smith who was then working for GEC-Marconi as a Quality Audit Manager at the Hirst Research Centre in Wembley. From MI5’s standpoint, this unexpected windfall proved extremely useful, because buried in Mitrokhin’s notes was a comprehensive account of the work for the London rezidentura conducted by the spy codenamed BORG. Thus, by coincidence, two KGB defectors had independently fingered Smith, and also served to confirm each other’s bona-fides. Relying on Oshchenko’s tip, MI5 had entrapped the quality assurance engineer by sending one of its officers, masquerading as a Russian, to re-establish contact with BORG, and record him making some damaging admissions. Smith was eventually prosecuted, although he denied being reactivated as a spy by the KGB in 1990, and when he was arrested at his home in Kingston-upon-Thames on 8th August 1992 his car was found to contain unclassified documents concerning the Rapier anti-aircraft missile and an obsolete document claimed to have been used on the ALARM missile. Professor Meirion Francis Lewis, a witness at Smith’s trial, was the key expert who commented on the ALARM evidence. MI5 had been embarrassed to discover that Smith’s security clearance had been removed in 1978, when he had been spotted as a former CPGB member, but by then he had sold his KGB contact details of the WE-177 nuclear bomb fuze. Smith’s conviction had been based, not on Mitrokhin’s material, but on Oshchenko’s tip, and John Major had been briefed on the progress of the investigation by MI5's Stella Rimington - twice, in June and October 1993. In the government’s Cabinet reshuffle of July 1995 Malcolm Rifkind replaced Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary and by the end of the month he had read an account of the JESSANT case, but it was not until March the following year that SIS sought his approval in principle to the publication of the archive, and an inter-departmental working group was created, representing MI5, SIS, the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office, chaired by John Alpass, Warner’s replacement as Intelligence Coordinator. A former Deputy Director-General of the Security Service until 1994, Alpass did not hold his working party’s inaugural meeting until the end of June 1996, by which time SIS had nominated Christopher Andrew as a suitable editor of Mitrokhin’s archive. The original incentive to publish had come from Mitrokhin, whose life ambition had been to release his purloined material, while SIS was preoccupied with exploiting the information from the papers that had by now been shared with no less than twelve other countries. Some three hundred names had been passed to the French security agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), while MI5 was concerned that the imminent prosecution of the former NSA spy Robert Lipka in the United States might reveal Mitrokhin’s role to the media. If Lipka went to trial, so the FBI advised MI5, the authorities might be forced to reveal the source of the information that had prompted the criminal investigation. Such a disclosure would have been unwelcome in London where it was judged that there were still plenty more leads to be pursued. From an operational point of view, Mitrokhin’s insistence on publishing his material must have been quite a nuisance to SIS, but it was the one condition he had imposed on defection, apart from the resettlement of his family. Naturally SIS wanted to squeeze every operational advantage from his archive before his defection became public knowledge, with all the security problems such a disclosure would imply. It is not uncommon to keep a defection secret, leaving his former employers uncertain about his fate and maybe reluctant to suspend their activities. Once the Russian SVR knew for certain that Mitrokhin had defected to the British it would be likely to undertake a damage limitation exercise and estimate what current operations he might have compromised. Although SIS was confident that the Russians would have no inkling of the size of the catastrophe Mitrokhin represented, as the idea that any single person could accumulate as much material as the archivist had seemed incredible, any public statement confirming his presence in Britain would unquestionably complicate his personal security. It would also allow the Russians to instigate counter-measures, and at the very least send a warning to their assets across the globe, perhaps eliminating the option of conducting the kind of sting entrapments that thus far had netted Smith, Lipka and Trofimoff. In all three cases the retired spies had been tricked into making highly incriminating statements that had been recorded. All had been telephoned at home by men masquerading as Russian intelligence officers anxious to re-establish contact, and in every case the former spies had agreed to meetings. Once these tactics had been publicised, no other retirees would be likely to fall into the same trap, hence the need to keep the lid on what had been happening. When the new Labour government was elected in May 1997 the incoming prime minister, Tony Blair, already knew about the JESSANT project, as he had been briefed by Sir Robin Butler in January 1995. On that occasion the intended topic of conversation had been the imminent publication of Oleg Gordievsky’s memoirs, Last Stop Execution, which was to include references to various senior figures in the Labour Party. Gordievsky’s intention, to expose the journalist and author Richard Gott, had been leaked to the Spectator the previous month, but he had others in his sights, among them Michael Foot, who had been cultivated by the suave Mikhail P. Lyubimov, one of the KGB’s most cosmopolitan officers who had arrived in London under third secretary cover in 1963. According to Gordievsky, Foot was codenamed BOOT and had accepted money from the KGB in the form of subscriptions to Tribune, but he also had a list of other KGB targets, among them the trade union leaders Richard Briginshaw, Ray Buckton, codenamed BARTOK, and Alan Safer. Gordievsky’s book was intended to have an explosive impact, and Bulter’s meeting with Blair had been planned to assure the Labour leader that the defector’s allegations had been corroborated by another source, namely Mitrokhin. As a ‘Line PR’ political specialist, and the KGB’s rezident-designate in London until his recall in May 1985, Gordievsky had gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of the rezidentura’s targets and, more importantly, its list of ‘confidential contacts’. The unexploded bomb, waiting to detonate, was the catalogue of left-wingers in the Parliamentary Labour Party whom Gordievsky intended to denounce, among them the three MPs Joan Lestor, Jo Richardson and Joan Maynard. All, of course, were well-known for their pro-Soviet views, but according to Gordievsky, the KGB prized them as ‘confidential contacts’. It is likely that at his meeting with Blair the Cabinet Secretary might have hinted, while revealing the existence of the new defector, that other Labour Party names might emerge. Two did, but both Tom Driberg and Raymond Fletcher were dead. A former YCL and CPGB member and codenamed LEPAGE by the KGB, Driberg had been Chairman of the Labour Party and had died in August 1976, having been ennobled as Lord Bradwell. He was the MP I had first encountered on the beat in Covent Garden, and later had appeared in my dossier on corruption in British public life. Fletcher, codenamed PETER when he was recruited in 1962, had been elected the MP for Ilkeston two years later, and had died in 1991. He had spent twenty-one years in the Commons but had been thought by MI5 to have been run as an influential source by the Czech StB. Tony Blair may not have realised the implications of what he had been told by Butler in January 1995, when JESSANT’s book project had not yet begun, but the new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, was briefed on 24 October 1997, five months after he had taken office, but there were some serious omissions from the paper placed before him on that occasion. For example, it did not mention the restrictions placed on the project by his predecessor, Malcolm Rifkind, and insisted, quite incorrectly, that ‘no British national will be named without Security Service agreement’. In fact, of course, Rifkind’s ban had extended to all names, British and foreign, and had specifically excluded MI5 from making the decision about naming names. Thus, on the very first occasion Cook was indoctrinated into the JESSANT secret, he was materially misinformed about the terms under which the project had been allowed to proceed in the first place. Not only had the main Rifkind rule been dropped, but the paper had created an entirely new principle of MI5 giving its approval to particular identifications. Now out of office, and indeed out of Parliament having lost his seat at the 1997 general election, Rifkind was not consulted about this extraordinary development, and under the Whitehall rules which prevent new administrations learning of the deliberations of its predecessors, Cook could only take the word of his civil servants for what had happened previously. It was at this stage that Cook ought to have intervened and talked the whole issue through with his Cabinet colleague Jack Straw, who had been trained as a lawyer before he had been elected to the Commons. If Cook had not been able to see the legal pitfalls in allowing MI5 to decide who should, or should not be named in The Mitrokhin Archive, Straw probably would have spotted them, but in the event he was not consulted. Cook’s only excuse would have been that he was at the time conducting an affair with his secretary and was preoccupied with supervising what he termed ‘an ethical foreign policy’. Once Cook had given his approval to the departmental paper on the Mitrokhin project, the Prime Minister’s consent was requested two months later, but was not forthcoming until early in January 1998 because of concerns about a possible adverse reaction in Moscow. Tony Blair and his foreign policy advisers evidently were worried about how Mitrokhin’s revelations would be received by Vladimir Putin, himself a former FCD officer, and doubtless the Kremlin could have been expected to be irritated by the way Mitrokhin had been spirited out of Russia. Despite these fears Dr Andrew had been pressing ahead with his drafts of the book, even though he did not sign any formal contract with SIS until the middle of February 1998, when MI5 complained about the way SIS had been feeding material to the historian. In fact the absence of any ‘watertight legal contract’ with Dr Andrew had been discussed by the working group as early as March 1997, but because he had already undergone a positive vetting procedure while working with Gordievsky on KGB: The Inside Story, and had signed the Official Secrets Act, SIS regarded his security clearance as sufficient guarantee of his co-operation and compliance. This sequence of events also reveals astonishing complacency, inertia and ineptitude in Whitehall, for the Prime Minister did not give his consent to the publication project until the New Year of 1998, by which time it had well underway for more than eighteen months, with Dr Andrew having commenced his work before the end of June 1996, apparently on a voluntary basis, and certainly without any publishing contract. It was not until the middle of June 1998 that MI5 finally cleared the British material for the JESSANT project and belatedly began to realise the grave implications of the references in the text to HOLA, the spy described in subsequent correspondence as ‘an 86 year-old woman who spied for the KGB 40 years ago’. This, of course, was Melita Norwood and the new Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was told of the situation, for the first time, on 10 December 1998, and informed that John Alpass’s working party was scheduled to meet in the middle of January 1999 to discuss progress. The Home Office minute addressed to Straw, and his Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir David Omand, explained that MI5 had decided not to approach Mrs Norwood directly because of her age, and the lack of hard evidence against her. Neither the references to her in the single VENONA text, nor in Mitrokhin’s notes, amounted to evidence on which a successful prosecution could be mounted, or so MI5’s legal adviser believed, and he had written to the Attorney-General, John Morris, for confirmation of MI5’s decision to take no action against her. Morris’s reaction to the request was to advise that any judge looking at the matter in 1999 would rule the prosecution an abuse of process because MI5 had known of Mrs Norwood’s espionage since 1965, but had done nothing. The last opportunity for the police to intervene, he opined, had been six years earlier, in late 1992, when MI5 had learned of the new evidence from Mitrokhin, but the intervening gap had made a successful prosecution quite impossible because the European Convention on Human rights required expeditious prosecutions. Clearly implied in the advice from the law officers was the criticism that to consider prosecution on the grounds that The Mitrokhin Archive would publicly expose Mrs Norwood as a spy was a completely improper motive. In layman’s terms, the lawyers were telling the molehunters that a criminal prosecution was not an expedient to be deployed in an effort to save a department’s embarrassment in the face of hostile comment from the media and the public. Nevertheless, the draft pages of The Mitrokhin Archive seen by the Alpass working party in January 1999 contained references to Mrs Norwood, Michael Smith and myself, although only Smith had been convicted of espionage. If the principles set out by Malcolm Rifkind were to be adhered to, only Smith’s identity should have been revealed, and it began to look as though MI5, headed since April 1996 by Dr Stephen Lander, was more concerned about its reluctance to have done anything about Mrs Norwood’s treachery, and its failure to act on my offer of information, than any other consideration. As the Security Service subsequently admitted, she had ‘slipped out of sight between August 1993 and June 1998’, which meant not that she had gone missing, but simply that MI5 had completely overlooked her case! We can now see that the meeting held on 15 January 1999, to which neither the Home Office nor the Foreign Office were invited to send representatives, was a deliberate attempt to cover up MI5’s lapse. The meeting had been convened specifically to discuss the situation regarding the British names, and by its conclusion had agreed that the Home Secretary’s consent would be required for them to be identified in the book. Almost unbelievably, this crucial decision was never conveyed to Jack Straw. Even worse, it was this assurance, already given falsely to Robin Cook, that had enabled him to endorse the project the previous month. Thus the Foreign Secretary had been duped into giving his approval to the publication on the basis of an entirely specious paper which had made no mention of Malcolm Rifkind’s rules, and had invented an entirely new criterion which may or may not have had MI5’s approval. Since this identical document was approved by Tony Blair in January 1988 one much presumes that it had been passed by MI5, although that is by no means certain. If MI5 did play a part in drafting that submission, then the Security Service was even more culpable for the deception. In any event, the Alpass working group was now claiming that the Home Secretary’s consent would be required for each British name included in |