Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| I had always admired Ken Drury, one of the Yard’s great thief-takers, although I had been aware of his involvement in corruption, although his activities seemed to me to be relatively harmless compared to Moody and the others. I had come to know him when we had both been working shifts together, and we often went up to the West End in the evenings. He was impressed by my contacts in the clubs, which dated back to my time in Lampson Paragon, while I had watched how he had handled his informants. I owed him much, including my success in the Sergeant’s Examination. I had told him that I intended to take a fortnight off to study for the test and he had advised me to use the time with my children, or in the garden, explaining that he would drop the questions round to me a few days before the exam was scheduled. ‘A couple of hours to revise and you’ll be okay’ he had predicted, and he was right. I had come near top of the list and was eligible for a command course at the Met’s staff college at Bramshill. Drury revealed that the papers were set by a couple of superintendents at the yard who well understood that men on specialist squads did not have the time to study, so they distributed a limited number of ‘short revision lists’ to favoured candidates. Thanks to Drury’s intervention, I had become on the chosen few, known as being ‘in the swim’. The alternatives were to be ‘on the square’ which involved a separate system of fixing the results, or years of fruitless study.
When I had worked for Drury he had often taken a commission from his sources who had received payments from the Met’s Informants’ Fund. He had considered it his right to take a ‘whack’ from individuals who had received cash from the police on his recommendation, and he had also skimmed the top off the rewards paid by the insurance companies. Officially police officers were ineligible for this cash, but Drury and many other people of his rank considered that the system was unfair and they were simply redressing the balance. As an observer of some of these transactions, I was in no position to raise any objection, unless I wanted my career prospects to go into tailspin. Clearly it was open season on the Met, and on 27 March my counsel received a letter in which I explained that ‘I am not at all happy about the justice of following them with the publicity about wicked detectives’. I offered to surrender if my trial could be delayed to let the feeding frenzy die down, but the response was an arrest warrant. The new reforming Commissioner, Robert Mark, had taken control at the Yard and within days had completely dismantled and reorganised its nine specialist CID squads. As an example, all the fourteen detectives of the Dirty Squad were reassigned, and the entire office turned over to uniformed officers. Unable to serve under Mark, Brodie took early retirement and the new ACC was Colin Woods, the head of the traffic division who had never spent a day as a Met detective. Wally Virgo was shuffled to one side, and a new anti-corruption unit, designated A10, was created in the administration branch, instead of the crime branch, and headed by Commander Ray Anning, a uniformed officer. Over the following months 82 officers were dismissed, and a further 301 resigned while under investigation. Mark’s vendetta against the CID included the transfer of hundreds of detectives into uniform, and the termination of the CID as a separate career path. Henceforth uniformed officers could switch straight into the CID and detectives were required to serve part of their time in uniformed posts. It was the end of an era, but it was not an environment I really wanted to return to, at least for a while. II
As I sat in the sun near Agadir, reading how dozens of London detectives were facing long prison sentences, I knew that I had made a lucky escape. The judge, Sir Sebag Shaw, threw the book at Robson and Harris, just as my barrister, Michael Sherrard, had predicted. I had been warned that the only hope was to undermine the evidence presented by the Times journalists, but this was disallowed at an early stage, during the pretrial committal proceedings. One of the crucial submissions, extremely relevant to my case, concerned the authenticity of the tape-recordings. A scientist had undermined their value by giving expert evidence for the defence that the recordings had not been continuous, and therefore could have been edited, but the judge refused the application to have them excluded. When I reported this dismal news to my brief, Michael Sherrard QC, at his chambers in the Middle Temple the same afternoon, and his junior, Brian Capstick, they looked pretty glum and I knew what I was in for. Both were experienced lawyers, set for brilliant careers at the bar, and their long faces spoke volumes. We were joined by my solicitor and his assistant, Harriet Harman, who took the notes, but there was not much for her to do. Considering the massive publicity given to bent coppers, and the judge’s inclusion of very dubious tapes, what chance did I have? My trial was set for April 1972, but in my absence I was sacked by the Met’s disciplinary board and identified publicly for the first time as a fugitive. Almost worse, I heard the news that a television interview I had given in London at the request of my solicitor, Ben Birnberg, in which I had confirmed police maltreatment of some of his clients, had been broadcast. I had believed there was no danger of the film, Radical Lawyer, going out until after my trial, but its premature release really meant that I had burned all my bridges in England. The programme, made by a producer named Fitzgerald, was intended to be a profile of the anti-establishment solicitor, and his claims of institutionalised racism and the victimisation of his black clients would have been nothing more that unsubstantiated assertions if I had not appeared too, as a serving detective, to confirm his allegations. I gave what was presented on camera as an authoritative, inside view from the Met of a generally hostile attitude to black criminals. Whereas the Yard might have been able to shrug off the charges of discrimination as being without foundation, my contribution served to substantiate the worst of them, and obviously caused acute embarrassment for the Met’s senior management. The messages I received suggested that the climate of opinion in London, already hostile, had now become positively dangerous. A planned month’s holiday in the sun was beginning to look rather more permanent, and I took the necessary precautions, the first being a new passport. The second was a lengthy document in which I described my own experiences in the Met, and named dozens of my colleagues who, by the standards that had been applied to me in London, were equally corrupt, if not much more so, I had little difficulty in preparing this dossier because I had prepared an original version in London and entrusted it to my solicitor, Victor Lissack. Much later I was to discover that Lissack had sent a copy of this long document to the Yard and if, as I suspect, it was seen by Moody, it would go a long way towards explaining his antipathy towards me. With that statement in circulation, it have become a priority to keep me as far away as possible from the Yard. Obtaining a genuine passport in a false name is relatively easy, and the procedure was revealed many years ago by Frederick Forsyth in his thriller The Day of the Jackal. My adaptation of Forsyth’s version was to use the name of an acquaintance who was roughly my age, and I knew had never been abroad. Nor, because of his job, was he likely to apply for a passport himself so I felt almost as safe as if I had used the name of someone who had died so young they were unlikely to have applied for a passport. John Freeman had absolutely no knowledge of what I was up to, but with the help of a friend in England I had no difficulty in acquiring the treasured blue document containing my photograph. Thenceforth, I was an almost legitimate John Freeman, and had my freedom of movement restored. Although travel back to England was theoretically possible, I was discouraged from doing so by DCS Moody, with whom I remained in loose contact via an intermediary, Ian Harley, who was a serving detective sergeant and played a difficult game with considerable skill, as it was to turn out, to my disadvantage. At one moment Harley himself had been under investigation, but had been cleared, and while he personally supplied the guarantee for my vehicle carnet, allowing me to use drive my vehicle across frontiers without any restrictions or deposits, he was also reporting my activities and intentions to Moody, who gave the clearest impression that he did not want me back in England. Indeed, Harley had bunged me £2,000 from the Dirty Squad to persuade me to leave in the first place, and had arranged for some spare parts for my motor caravan, a new model made by Ford and then unavailable outside England, to be shipped to Morocco. I had not been at Sundance long when a vague acquaintance, a Lebanese Arab known to me as Marcel, introduced me to someone I called ‘Gold Tooth’, who promised to study my dossier of police corruption and put me in touch with people who would be interested in pursuing my story. Supposedly Gold Tooth was a French journalist but I presumed that, like most French foreign correspondents, he was probably also a part-time agent of the French intelligence service. Undeterred, I seized this opportunity because although I had sent a copy of my dossier to some selected public figures, such as Lord Longford, nothing seemed to have happened, so I was quite ready to accept any help from any quarter, including the French, although I would have drawn the line at the Soviets. It simply never occurred to me that Gold Tooth was a KGB officer, as he turned out to be, or that Marcel was one of his agents. Anyway, in the meantime I was offered work as a mercenary by the owner of the Sundance Village, a former pilot who had flown relief missions into Biafra. His resort had become a magnet for other mercenaries, and my first job was at Kitwe in Zambia, to train local soldiers on former British Army 25-pounders. This was the excitement I had craved, and proved a useful distraction to what might have been the very disagreeable alternative in London. My fellow mercenaries were soldiers of fortune drawn from across the globe, but I gravitated towards a group of eight with whom I work as part of a team. Among them was ‘Brummie’, a former gunner that I had served with at Bradbury Lines. He subsequently had joined the 22nd Special Air Service regiment simply to stay in Hereford, where his girlfriend had lived, but he knew his trade well and was a influential voice among us when we discussed various proposals for future assignments. The original leader of this group had disappeared, having taken the deposit for a mercenary job, and I had been elected their leader. The first hint that Marcel was not entirely what he seemed was the proposal put to me that I should travel to England and find Oleg Lyalin, the KGB officer who had defected to MI5 in August 1971. A proficient marksman and parachutist, Lyalin worked as a ‘Line F’ officer in the ‘Department V’ which had been created in 1953 following embarrassing disclosures about assassinations conducted by the KGB’s notorious Thirteenth Department, which was promptly closed down and renamed. Aged thirty-four, Lyalin’s cover was that of a low-ranking official in the RAZNO import-export office, but had been caught conducting a clandestine affair with his attractive blonde secretary, Irina Teplyakova, by a joint SIS/Security Service unit, and he had been persuaded to remain at his post in the trade delegation and compromise the rezidentura’s entire order-of-battle. Six months later, at the end of August 1971, he had been stopped by a police patrol car in the Tottenham Court Road and charged with drunk driving. Aware of the dire consequences this incident would have on his career, Lyalin made an emergency call to his MI5 handler who arranged for Special Branch detectives to rescue the spy from their uniformed colleagues. This was not quite what MI5 had planned for Lyalin, but he would have been useless as a source if he had been returned to Moscow in disgrace so he was resettled in a safe-house to undergo many weeks of debriefing. Lyalin’s evidence had been used by the British government to launch Operation BOOT and expel ninety Soviet intelligence professionals from London, and ban a further fifteen on leave from re-entry, among them the KGB rezident, Yuri Voronin. The Foreign Office also took the opportunity to impose a limit on the number of diplomats the Soviets could send as replacements. It was a blow from which the KGB took years to recover and effectively eliminated several dozens of KGB and GRU professionals from the espionage game permanently, among them Richardas Vaygauskas, the Lithuanian-born KGB deputy rezident operating under consular cover in London who had been cultivating Lord Kagan, one of Harold Wilson’s closest confidants. Born in Lithuania, Kagan was an industrialist and the owner of the Gannex raincoat company who had been knighted by Wilson in 1970, and then elevated to the peerage in the prime minister's notorious resignation honours in 1976. He had been the subject of an intensive MI5 investigation which had monitored his meetings with Vaykauskas and another KGB officer from the London rezidentura, Boris Titov, but ultimately Kagan had been imprisoned, not for espionage, but a company and tax fraud. Lyalin also identified various commercial positions in London, in the Moscow Narodny Bank, the Soviet Film Agency and the UMO plant–hire business, which were reserved for KGB use. Furthermore, Lyalin had identified his principal agent, Sirioj Abdoolcader, a clerk in the Greater London Council’s motor licensing department who had access to details of MI5’s fleet of surveillance vehicles. Recruited originally by the KGB in 1967, Abdoolcader was arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, and two other co-conspirators, a pair of young Greek Cypriot tailors in touch with Moscow by radio, were also detained. Constantinos Martianos and his brother-in-law Kyriacos Costi received four and six years’ respectively, having admitted working for a contact known to them as ALEX, who was, of course, Lyalin, who had prepared tasks for them in the event of a war. Lyalin also revealed details of the KGB’s war contingency plans which included sabotage schemes and targets across the country, ranging from the early warning radar station at Fylingdale, the dispersal sites for the RAF’s V-bomber fleet, and a scheme to flood the London Underground system. Lyalin was also able to provide insights into Department V’s plans for similar attacks in other European capitals and Washington DC. Allegedly the disclosure of this material so embarrassed the KGB’s chairman, Yuri Andropov, that he ordered Department to be closed down immediately. The episode had been an unprecedented disaster for both the GRU and the KGB, and as a result Lyalin was a marked man. The threat was a serious one for Moscow had a long history of exacting retribution from traitors. Sometimes the murders were made to look like suicides, but as often as not the execution would not be disguised, so as to send a clear message to others contemplating defection to the west. Lyalin, of course, had been resettled with a new identity, and was under constant police and MI5 guard, but Marcel evidently thought I was the man to penetrate his security and make the hit. This was an offer I readily declined, having gone through the motions of consulting my group of mercenaries, although I had no doubt I would have been able to use my contacts to locate the target. I was under no illusions about being a wanted man in London and even if I had the protection of an authentic British passport to slip through immigration controls, I would be running a huge risk once I reached London and starting calling on old friends to track down Lyalin. The offer of a contract on Lyalin was my first real encounter with the murky world of espionage, and it was a useful lesson in my appreciation of how ruthless the KGB could be. Lyalin had offended his masters and his assassination was a top priority, but it was not a mission that either Brummie nor I were prepared to undertake. Instead of shooting Lyalin, I took on another mercenary job, a relatively risk-free reconnaissance in Chad, where in my somewhat weakened condition I contracted malaria. Initially I seemed to recover from this recurring disease, and within a few weeks, moving between our bases at Kitwe in Zambia and Sale in Morocco, I was well enough to develop a partnership in Ghana with Dr George Busby, a physican who had qualified in England and had established himself with the leaders of the military junta running the country. This involved setting up an import-export business named Meggs, the initials of his five children, and although the work was undemanding, I fell ill again and my condition began to deteriorate, handicapping my ability to live off my wits. When I fell ill in August 1973 Marcel arranged for me to fly to Bulgaria to recuperate, all expenses paid, at the holiday resorts of Burgos and Slunchenbryag, on the Black Sea. It did not take me long to realise that I was being treated much better than ordinary tourists, and I was being cultivated by a Russian from Siberia whom I knew as Nick, but whose real name was, I discovered much later, was Viktor Georgivitch Budanov. He was to be my constant companion for the next six years, but at that time he insisted that his only interest was to help me recuperate. In reality, of course, he was encouraging me to write a book about my experiences in London, with the none-too-subtle intention of compiling a dossier on police officers I could identify as corrupt, and maybe open to offers from his colleagues. We were installed in a seaside villa and it was here that Nick questioned me as I worked on my draft dossier. Although I had intended to keep the names of some of my friends and supporters out of the document, I found it hard to avoid naming them to Nick who was very persistent and presumably was under instructions to test my bona-fides at every opportunity to see if I was concealing anything. The result was that Nick extracted almost everything from me, including the identity of Ian Harley whom I then believed to have been my staunchest ally. These conversations had seemed at the time to be completely natural and informal, but I realised later that the rooms must have been wired for sound, and every word I said recorded. There was also something slightly odd about the extent of Nick’s knowledge that, at the time, I had not been able to put my finger on. Tall, blond and good-looking, Nick spoke fluent English and in on of our many conversations mentioned that he was married to a doctor, and that he had been expelled from London in 1971, along with the rest of the KGB professionals at the Trade Delegation and embassy. He eventually retired with the rank of colonel, and a decade of so later was involved in the interrogation of Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer recruited by SIS in Copenhagen who was exfiltrated from Moscow so brilliantly in August 1985. Gordievsky’s lengthy collaboration with SIS, which dated back to his recruitment in Copenhagen in 1973, had been betrayed to the KGB molehunters by the CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, and he had been recalled to Moscow from his post in London where he was the rezident-designate. With only the denunciation from Ames to work on, Gordievsky had been accused of treachery, and Budanov had been selected to conduct the investigation, probably because of his counter-intelligence experience, but maybe also because of his knowledge of England. Whatever the reason, Gordievsky had good cause to fear Budanov whom I knew to be a skilled counter-intelligence expert. Later I was to learn from Gordievsky that the KGB had decreed that the local police apparatus in any western country should become a priority target for the local rezidentura, and doubtless Nick’s interest in me, at that time, was to research any opportunities in London. What better agent could one have, in terms of managing a spy-ring in London, than an experienced, bent police officer with full access to the Police National Computer, the Criminal Records Office, and maybe the specialist squads in the Yard such as Special Branch? Nor was this, some pie-in-the-spy fantasy. It was well-known that the Soviets had run several police officers as agents after the 1919 police strike, and had even penetrated the Special Branch. Chapter II Bulgaria
The assignment, which I accepted in September 1973, was first to write to Nina announcing my imminent, unexpected arrival, and then to go to West Germany and contact her in Bonn. This I did, and after a pleasant interlude in my hotel where we renewed our friendship with genuine passion, I suggested that she come with me to Berlin where I had some business to attend to. Actually, Nick had instructed me to bring her to Berlin where the KGB would find it easier to monitor our conversations and apparently had made the appropriate technical arrangements in a designated hotel. There she confided to me, when I raised the sensitive subject, that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution’, the West German security apparatus based in Cologne (BfV) was narrowing on two possible sources in the Chancellor’s private office. One was a secretary, and the other was a political apparatchik, an SDP official named Gunter Guillaume. The only problem for me in hearing this news was Nina’s assertion that the original tip to the BfV had come from the British Secret Intelligence Service. This placed me in a considerable dilemma because my arrangement with the KGB was that I should not be asked to compromise British interests. I would be happy to assist them in every other field, but I was not prepared to work against my country. If SIS had discovered there was a spy at the heart of the German government, the implication was that SIS had either penetrated the HVA, the foreign intelligence branch of the East German Stasi, or the KGB, or maybe had broken some of their codes. Alternatively, I rationalised that the most likely source of information would have been a defector, so my only role would be to confirm information that the KGB probably had received already from other sources. As everyone knows, thieves are caught, not by brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction, but by grasses and rewards. It is much the same in the world of espionage, where most spies are caught, not by brilliant counter-espionage procedures, but by a betrayal from a defector, and if the HVA or the KGB had suffered such a loss, they would be bound to be aware of it, and presumably had taken the appropriate precautions to safeguard any agents in the field that might be compromised. Using this logic it followed that my credibility might depend on passing back Nina’s tip, and while this would probably enhance my reputation, it would probably not damage SIS or British interests. Accordingly, I promptly tipped off Nick that Guillaume was the subject of a current investigation, and it was only later, after I had passed on this disturbing news, that I learned Guillaume was rather more than a lowly party official. He was a close friend and one of three personal assistants to the German Chancellor, for whom he worked in his private office, and he was also a spy, a long-term mole run personally by Markus Wolf, the legendary chief of the East German HVA, who had recruited him, and his wife Christel, eighteen years earlier. |