Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
|
|  Yüklə 0.5 Mb.
|
| The Mitrokhnin Archive, although the Home Office remained entirely ignorant of this, and had been excluded from the meeting where this decision had been taken.
By the time MI5 had been prompted into action by the unwelcome news that The Mitrokhin Archive would document HOLA’s espionage, Dr Lander was scrambling around for cover to conceal his incompetence, and that of his predecessor, Dame Stella. If he thought he would be able to keep Mrs Norwood’s name out of the public arena he was mistaken, because of a separate exercise undertaken simultaneously by SIS, apparently on its own initiative. A few months earlier, on some undefined date in December 1998, a former Observer journalist, David Rose, had approached SIS for help in making a six-part television documentary series, The Spying Game, for the BBC, planned to be broadcast in the autumn 1999 schedules. Usually reticent to tangle with the media, SIS, under the leadership of McColl’s successor David Spedding since September 1994, agreed to collaborate with Rose, subject to ministerial approval. This development, in itself, was a very surprising breakthrough for an organisation that has always been shy of media attention, always defensive in the face of external scrutiny, on the entirely reasonable grounds that ‘secret services should be secret’. Now, perhaps sensing a public relations coup, to extract maximum credit for its handling of one of the century’s most important intelligence defectors, SIS was contemplating an unprecedented collaboration. Hitherto SIS personnel had been banned from making unauthorised public disclosures, writing their memoirs or otherwise discussing the nature of their work, even in the most general terms. For their part SIS had occasionally encouraged contacts with selected journalists when they were thought to have useful information, or had visited a particular part of the world, and of course had used journalism as cover for officers on missions when it was convenient to do so, but this had been a strictly one-way street. There had never been access to SIS’s legendary archive, and the only authors to read SIS’s ‘CX” reports were contracted academics writing official histories, not for publication but for the Cabinet Office’s Historical Branch. Now Spedding was sanctioning an arrangement that would include Sir Gerald Warner giving a filmed interview in which he would discuss what Mitrokhin had accomplished. Even when the veteran BBC reporter Tom Mangold filmed Oleg Gordievsky he had not been granted access to any of the defector’s SIS handlers, so Rose’s achievement represented quite a media milestone in access to SIS. The agreement between John Scarlett and Rose was ‘dependent on ministerial clearance for publication’ in the words of The Mirtokhin Inquiry Report, but was that sanction ever obtained by SIS and, if so, who from? The appropriate minister, responsible for all SIS’s activities, was Robin Cook, but according to the chronology of events assembled by the Intelligence and Security Committee, the new Foreign Secretary had only been informed of the JESSANT project on 24 October 1997, more than six weeks before David Rose approached SIS for the first time, so he could not have given his approval on that occasion. Cook’s private secretary wrote to the Prime Minister’s private secretary ‘outlining the Mitrokhin story and the publication project’ on 2 December, and this was the catalyst for an exchange of correspondence which resulted in the green light from Blair on 8 January 1988. But what precisely had he given his approval to? The book project was one matter, but the television collaboration was entirely different, and if that topic was not part of Cook’s submission to 10 Downing Street, as seems likely, the issue of publication was not raised with Cook again until the end of March 1999. This lacuna was to be of critical importance when the original plan, for the television programme to boost the book, was reversed and, as we shall see, the BBC ended up dictating the content of the book. So in the meantime, had SIS obtained any ministerial approval for the BBC’s involvement? The odds are against it because nobody else knew of the plan until late in February 1999 when SIS disclosed the BBC proposal to Alpass and to the Security Service, a revelation that obviously served to exacerbate Lander’s dilemma, especially when the following month the Attorney-General ruled out any prosecution of Mrs Norwood. Almost simultaneously, Robin Cook was informed on 22 March that the manuscript of the book had been completed by Dr Andrew, and a redacted version of it was passed by SIS to David Rose. While this was true, Cook was also told that the ‘Security Service are clearing the detail contained in those chapters [referring to British cases] with the Home Secretary (who was briefed on the project in 1998, and is supportive) and the Attorney-General’. Every part of this assurance, of course, was completely untrue. The sensitive chapters dealing with me and HOLA were not being cleared by MI5 with Jack Straw, and the Attorney-General, as we now know, had made his views on the matter very plain, and did not intend to play any role in approving the disclosures. In short, Cook was completely misled, for the second time. Once again, he failed to realise he had been duped. In terms of the BBC, it also looks as though the Foreign Secretary was presented with a fait accompli on 22 March, and nothing like the request for ministerial approval mentioned to the BBC in December. Reading between the lines of the Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, which is far from explicit on this most sensitive topic, it rather looks as though Cook had absolutely no idea, at any time, that he was being misrepresented as having authorised the entire collaboration with the BBC. At a crucial meeting of the working group held on 7 June 1999 John Alpass explained that Cook had given his approval, Jack Straw ‘was aware of the project’ and that because of the Attorney-General’s view that a prosecution was impossible, HOLA’s true name would not appear in the text. The ambiguity, in what exactly ‘the project’ encompassed, is obvious. In addition, SIS announced that Rose intended to devote an entire programme to Mitrokhin but ‘would not use material which was not in the book’. Apparently satisfied by this state of affairs, although this was a very precise description of what would eventually happen, Alpass then wrote a report to the Cabinet Secretary to update him on the latest developments. It may well have been that, based on this reassurance, MI5 believed that it had been let off the hook, for Scarlett had given the group his opinion that the BBC would not be able to use HOLA’s true name, but the ticking time bomb detonated on 23 June when David Rose revealed to SIS that he had been able to identify HOLA. How had he accomplished this? SIS subsequently asserted that Rose had researched clues ‘based on details in the book The Haunted Wood, combined with his own efforts in Washington DC’ but this could not have been true. The Haunted Wood was one of five books originally commissioned by Crown Books in New York and negotiated with the KGB by the Cambridge historian John Costello and his editor, James Wade. Each of the five titles were to have been written jointly by a western historian and a selected KGB officer, and Harvey Weinstein’s chosen partner in his project, on Soviet espionage in the United States during the early Cold War, was Alexander Vassiliev, who arranged supervised access to certain records locked away in the KGB and Central Committee archives. The only problem with Scarlett’s explanation of Rose’s discovery was that neither Weinstein nor Vassiliev had even the slightest idea of Mrs Norwood’s existence. They did know of the single VENONA message addressed to London in September 1945 which had referred to TINA, but they had absolutely no reason to connect her with Mrs Norwood and did not do so, which explains why the text of The Haunted Wood contains no clue to it, but does not thrown any light on Scarlett’s assertion. The explanation for Scarlett’s ‘misdirection’ was either to conceal SIS’s own leak, or to cover up an indiscretion on the part of the FBI, implying that Rose had somehow extracted Mrs Norwood’s name in the United States from a member of the FBI’s counter-intelligence staff which had been briefed on the JESSANT material. However he had achieved his tip, but now armed with her true name, Rose had found her listed in the London telephone directory, and on the electoral roll, and he obviously intended to confront her. Clearly aghast at this unwelcome development, Alpass immediately wrote to the Cabinet Secretary to inform him that the wheels had come off the project. He confirmed that ‘the intention has been not to reveal HOLA’s identity in the book’ but admitted that the BBC had ‘now correctly identified her from other sources of information, and they may be tempted to break the story before September’. The understatement is not hard to discern, as it must have been a racing certainty that no self-respecting journalist, and nobody with Rose’s credentials, would fail to follow up such a crucial lead. Quite simply, he was on to a scoop and he would be bound to exploit it. In other words, now that the BBC had found out HOLA’s identity, Alpass suspected the broadcaster was going to renege on its collaboration agreement with SIS. But what were the terms of that arrangement, and who were the parties to it? These were the inconvenient questions that would go unanswered, and anyway unasked by the Intelligence and Security Committee. What is curious about this episode is that instead of pressing the BBC to keep to its original agreement, as might have been expected, ‘the working group was persuaded by the book’s publisher to include the names of Mrs Norwood and Mr Symonds’, which is a breathtaking admission, although the Intelligence and Security Committee failed to establish whether this persuasion occurred on 24 June or 19 July. This is important because if, as seems likely, John Alpass caved in at the June meeting, absolutely no effort was made to hold the BBC to the terms agreed with Christopher Andrew. It follows therefore that, however bizarrely, SIS had taken on the role at the meeting of representing the interests of the publishers and the BBC, and neatly sandbagged Alpass and his hapless MI5 colleagues. Having congratulated themselves on obtaining what amounted to a veto for the Home Secretary to exercise on their behalf, they had been completely outmanoeuvred and now faced the prospect of publication of British names in a way that was entirely contrary to the Rifkind rules. Alpass correctly anticipated massive media and parliamentary interest in Mitrokhin’s disclosures, and said Jack Straw would be briefed on the latest developments, adding that he believed that it was not necessary to involve the Prime Minister any further. Despite Alpass’s plea, the Cabinet Secretary copied his memorandum to Tony Blair’s private secretary but, amazingly, it was never read by the Prime Minister himself. However, officials at the Home Office instantly grasped the implications and decided to lay the blame where it was deserved, with MI5. In MI5’s previous version of events, given to Straw on 22 April 1999, Lander had implied that Mrs Norwood had escaped prosecution because it had been vetoed by the Attorney-General, whereas the truth was that Morris had advised in March that MI5’s five years of inertia between 1993 and 1998 had prejudiced any chance of a prosecution. Far from having refused to allow Mrs Norwood to be prosecuted, Morris had simply pointed out that such an attempt would be completely improper. Thus finally, on 29 June 1999, Straw learned that MI5’s previous memorandum, dated two months earlier on 22 April, had been thoroughly misleading and nothing more than a thin attempt to conceal its incompetence. Incredibly, MI5’s desperate solution was to attend a further meeting of the working group, on 19 July (without representatives of the Home Office or the Foreign Office present) and ask for Alpass to request ‘ministerial guidance’ on whether to interview Mrs Norwood before the BBC got to her, bearing in mind its strong objection to doing so. These bizarre events can only be interpreted as MI5, having decided not to confront HOLA, wanted some cover for it omission. At best, this would have amounted to an administrative fig-leaf, but it is indicative of MI5’s mindset that it was even willing to contemplate adopting such a strategy. The degree of panic that set in over the next few days was heightened by a circular from David Spedding celebrating the imminent publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, apparently unaware of the hideous problem that had arisen over HOLA. Spedding trumpeted that the project had received the full support of allied and European intelligence agencies and amounted to an impressive intelligence coup, but omitted any mention of Mitrokhin’s British spies. Evidently dismayed by Spedding’s insensitivity, MI5 wrote to him on 20 July explaining that the Home Office had briefed Straw, but the decision whether to interview HOLA ‘was an operational matter and not an issue on which the Home Secretary should become engaged’. Thus, within twenty-four hours, MI5 had altered its position from seeking ‘ministerial guidance’ on whether to approach Mrs Norwood, to exercising its constitutional independence and right to take operational decisions without consulting the Home Secretary. This reversal occurred when the Security Service representative on the working group reported to Thames House, and someone at a senior level, if not Lander himself, had telephoned the Home Office to clarify MI5’s position. Once again, Whitehall was in pandemonium. Alpass’s worst fears were realised when David Rose, accompanied by his producer Sarah Hann, visited Mrs Norwood at her semi-detached home on Tuesday, 10 August, with a hidden camera and a wireless microphone which transmitted their two-hour conversation over the dining-room table to a van parked in the street where a Times journalist, Andrew Peirce, eagerly recorded it. The necessity of obtaining an accurate record of her unguarded admissions was paramount because of a potential obstacle that had been pointed out by the lawyers who had read the material that Dr Andrew’s publishers, Penguin Books, had submitted to Brian MacArthur of The Times for the newspaper serialisation, scheduled for mid-September. They had advised that unless Mrs Norwood incriminated herself, the inclusion of her name would open the publishers, authors and newspaper to the possibility of an expensive legal action for defamation. The offending pages could not be published without an admission or consent from the widow. Fortunately for all three, Mrs Norwood had lost none of her political zealotry, had no hesitation in acknowledging her role in espionage, and her remarks were clearly audible on the video soundtrack. As far as The Times and the BBC were concerned, they both had their story and there were no legal grounds for concealing HOLA’s identity any further. Although VENONA was not mentioned during the interview, Mrs Norwood confirmed that her husband Hilary, a mathematics teacher who had died in 1986, ‘did not agree with what I did’ but had also been a hardline CPGB member. This news was reported to SIS which relayed it to MI5, and resulted in a formal note from Home Office officials to Jack Straw, on 31 August, which can only be seen as an effort to ensure MI5 got the blame for what had happened. The BBC had beaten MI5 to Garden Avenue, Bexleyheath, and the Home Office complained that they had not been invited to the crucial meeting held by Alpass on 19 July, and that the record of the discussion ‘was much delayed in coming to us’. This was a really feeble response, bearing all the hallmarks of a Whitehall wriggle to escape the blame which was clearly visible on the horizon. Humiliated, having failed to interview HOLA, MI5 had again written to the Attorney-General to enquire if her recorded admissions to the BBC might have altered the legal position. Now the Security Service was really grasping at straws. As MI5 had doubtless anticipated, Morris just repeated his previous view that it was simply too late for a prosecution, an observation that cold have been made by a first-year law student. At this point MI5 appeared to be resigned to the criticism that it knew it would sustain over the inclusion of my name, and that of Mrs Norwood, in The Mitrokhin Archive, but even at this late stage it apparently only expected some ‘adverse publicity’ and not the full-scale fiasco that followed. In one final, desperate attempt to divert attention away from its failure to pursue HOLA, MI5 asked the Attorney-General to give consideration to the idea of prosecuting me on the basis on admissions I had made during an interview I had given to David Rose. Incredibly, while accepting that these remarks did not amount to admissible evidence, MI5 tried to list offences I might have committed under the Official Secrets Act, and asked for permission to launch a police investigation. The Attorney’s tart reply, within the week, was a reminder that I had been granted an immunity from prosecution fifteen years earlier, in 1984, and that the immunity remained valid. My supposed ‘admissions’ were actually nothing more than remarks I made in the television interview I had been persuaded by Sarah Hann to give David Rose, on her assurance that a senior Russian general had defected in secret and had corroborated everything I had said previously about my eight years with the KGB. I came to regret ever having agreed to talk to Rose because by the time his film had been edited I was made to look as though I had been trained as a ‘Romeo spy’ in Bulgaria, long before I ever reached Moscow. This, of course, was absurd, but then Rose compounded the offence by selling what purported to be a lengthy exclusive interview with me to a newspaper, when I had quite clearly stipulated that I intended to retain my rights over the original television interview, for which I had accepted a minimal fee on the understanding that I would share in subsequent syndication sales. My consent to the original interview had been on the basis that I was to be vindicated, particularly in respect of the allegations I had made so many years earlier in the Daily Express. In the event, I was completely misrepresented, as were my experiences. Instead of being portrayed as someone who had volunteered potentially valuable information to the police and MI5, but had been rejected as a fantasist, I was presented by the BBC as a master-spy who had been tracked down by The Spying Game’s tenacious sleuths. As it turned out, advance copies of The Mitrokhin Archive had been distributed in the United States, in breach of the press embargo imposed until the newspaper serialisation was intended to commence, on 16 September. As word leaked of the book’s contents to ABC TV in New York, The Times was obliged to print its story a week early, on Saturday 11 September catching everyone, including Dr Andrew who was attending a conference in Berlin without a cellphone, completely unawares. Suddenly the plan to release The Mitrokhin Archive in a carefully controlled and unsensational manner had completely fallen apart, and my name, and that of Mrs Norwood, were front page news. For all of its ramifications, this publicity had at least one rewarding result, reuniting me with Nellie. In retrospect the entire publication project seems to have been handled with the same lack of professionalism that marked the release of Dame Stella’s own controversial memoirs, Open Secret, in September 2001. Embarrassingly naïve and gauche, her autobiography made not a single mention of the entire Mitrokhin affair, and never explained why MI5 had bungled so badly. As I am in a unique position to document the organisation’s failures, it is worth listing them. There can be no doubt that Mitrokhin’s unexpected appearance in 1992 represented an impressive, unprecedented windfall for MI5 and SIS, amounting in total to 3,500 reports sent to the security authorities of 36 countries. Literally hundreds of Soviet agents world-wide were identified in his typescripts and scruffy envelopes packed with notes, and we know that MI5 amassed more than three hundred different leads to pursue in this country alone. As for SIS, the Mitrokhin goldmine was a further opportunity to build on its reputation which had been so enhanced by the successful recruitment, handling, exfiltration and resettlement of Oleg Gordievsky. The fact that the Danish security service had played an essential role in his recruitment and management in Copenhagen had been overlooked, and SIS had bathed in the welcome praise which had come from all quarters, including from the prime minister who had been so impressed when she had made a special tour of its training establishment, Fort Monckton. Once the object of derision and suspicion, following the very public penetrations accomplished by Kim Philby and George Blake, SIS had worked hard to shake off its reputation as an untrustworthy sieve. If the receipt of defectors is a valid litmus test of an intelligence agency’s operational integrity, Gordievsky and Mitrokhin represented eloquent proof SIS’s new-found efficacy. The same, however, could not be said of MI5. In evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee Dame Stella and Dr Lander claimed that their relatively tiny agency had been overwhelmed by the quantity of Mitrokhin’s material and, at a time when Irish terrorism was a priority, and the organisation was engaged on the lengthy investigation of the sabotage of a PanAm jet over Locherbie in December 1988, they had categorised the cases requiring investigation into four groups so as to concentrate on the spies who continued to pose a threat to classified information. However, on their own admission, HOLA fell into the second highest priority, so why was she shelved for nearly five years? Equally importantly, why did MI5 so chronically mishandle the so-called British names? Incredibly, these were not questions that Tom King’s committee ever posed. MI5 was rightly criticised in the media for having allowed Mrs Norwood to escape prosecution, but the real scandal was not so much its inept handling of the case, allowing it to go dormant for five years, but the cover-up it pursued thereafter to conceal the scale of the blunder, even to the point of misrepresenting to the Home Secretary the legal advice it had received from the Attorney-General. As for Mrs Norwood herself, MI5 has consistently downplayed her significance, asserting that ‘her value as an atom spy to the scientists who constructed the Soviet bomb must have been, at most, marginal’. Surprisingly, nobody appears to have taken MI5 to task over this woefully inadequate assessment of HOLA, nor even asked how such a review could have been compiled with any accuracy if they had never bothered to interview her. What is known is that she had been active in 1938 and connected to the Woolwich Arsenal spy-ring headed by Percy Glading. Then she was in a position of access, compromising atomic secrets, according to the single VENONA message concerning TINA dating back to September 1945. We know too that MI5 closed their file on Mrs Norwood in 1966 because the VENONA material was far from conclusive and anyway was not admissible in a criminal prosecution, saying she no longer posed a threat because her security clearance had been revoked in 1951. However, Mitrokhin made some extremely important disclosures, not the least of which was the revelation that HOLA had been handled by the KGB illegal Konon Molody until his arrest in January 1961. Working under the Canadian alias ‘Gordon Lonsdale’, Molody had been the KGB’s illegal rezident in London who had supervised the Portland spy-ring, and had been in contact with Morris and Lona Cohen, the American couple who had handled much of his covert communications. Molody’s arrival in London in March 1955 represented the first time that there had been a Soviet illegal rezident in Britain since the departure of Arnold Deutsch in October 1937, and was therefore an event of some considerable significance. Of interest to MI5 was the fact that Molody had not been introduced to Harry Houghton by his KGB handler, Vasili Dozhdalev, until October 1959, so what had the illegal been up to in the meantime? This interesting fact had been disclosed by Houghton who, after his arrest, had cooperated with his interrogators in the vain hope of minimising his sentence, or even turning Queen’s Evidence. One possible explanation was that Molody had been running Mrs Norwood, or a spy-ring associated with her. Molody’s own somewhat disingenuous memoirs, |