To Catch a Spy (eBook)

1. SUI GENERIS

On a cool, dull day in June 1955 a tall and intense figure strode through the warren of streets between Park Lane and Piccadilly in the heart of London’s West End. His purposeful gait, as he marched through Mayfair, was the result of a long-awaited summons.

Peter Maurice Wright was 39. A self-taught but often innovative scientist, he was impatient, unruly and unashamedly ambitious. He had toiled for years in the sluggish backwaters of the Admiralty’s research divisions, developing anti-submarine equipment. To his mind, at least, his talents were disappointingly underappreciated. True, he had earned some kudos from both British and American intelligence services for unravelling the mysteries of Soviet wireless surveillance technology, but thus far his career had been a frustrating struggle for recognition.

Now, at last, his abilities were finally being acknowledged. Peter Wright was about to join the most famous spy service that didn’t – officially – exist.

Halfway down Curzon Street was an anonymous six-storey building. There was no brass nameplate on the red-brick walls to identify who, or what, occupied the premises, but the address and its purpose was an open secret.

For eight years Leconfield House had been the headquarters of the Security Service, and bus conductors habitually announced to passengers on London’s red double-deckers rumbling along Park Lane that the next stop was ‘Curzon Street and MI5’.1

Peter Wright was ushered through the notional security of a wood- and glass-panelled alcove by a uniformed guard, before being escorted into an old-fashioned lift, operated by an equally archaic brass lever. The contraption slowly wheezed him to the fifth floor, where he was guided through a maze of shabby corridors and into MI5’s inner sanctum: the office of the Director General, Sir Dick Goldsmith White.

For the next twenty minutes, White grilled Wright about the newly created role for which he was being proposed. MI5 had never employed an in-house scientist, and Britain’s chief spymaster remained sceptical of the need for one, let alone what benefits this unconventional candidate might offer for the defence of the realm. ‘I’m not sure we need an animal like you in the Service,’ he mused. ‘But if you are prepared to give it a try, so are we.’2

Before dismissing Wright to the bowels of the building for the initial induction process, White stressed the unique and ambiguous position of the Security Service: it was not, he emphasised, like any other department of state.

MI5 was ‘unacknowledged’ by the government: its name would never be spoken in Parliament or by ministers, its efforts to defend the country would go unacknowledged in public, and its officers held no official rank. If there was one unshakable article of faith, it was that what transpired within the walls of Leconfield House was never to be revealed outside them.

Yet this fundamental principle of lifelong omertà was – at that very moment – being tested. Within the dusty corridors of Whitehall, a bad-tempered and bitterly fought dispute had been rumbling for a year, and its cause was Dick White’s immediate predecessor as Britain’s chief domestic spy. Sir Percy Sillitoe, the recently retired Director General, intended to publish his memoirs.

The organisation that Peter Wright was set to join was antiquated and barely fit for purpose. By the summer of 1955, MI5 was stranded between the warm glow of fading glories earned during the Second World War and the first harbingers of a much less winnable conflict in the new Cold War with the Soviet Union. That several of these unwelcome heralds turned out to be skeletons emerging from within its own dusty closets rather highlighted the problem.

After a shaky start in 1939, MI5 had enjoyed a good war. During the 1930s it had been allowed to wither on the vine of governmental indifference, budgetary reductions and staff cuts. When war with Germany became inevitable, MI5 was short of funding and personnel, and staff adopted an unconventional approach to solve the urgent need for recruitment. As the newly installed Director General, Sir David Petrie, recorded in an internal report in 1941:

Many of these new – and entirely unvetted – spies were drawn from the traditional intelligence hunting ground of Cambridge University. None had any prior association with espionage or defence, but were appointed on the assumption that they were the intellectual, and often aristocratic, elite of their generation. Two, in particular, would encapsulate the simultaneous strength and weakness of this scattergun policy: Victor Rothschild, glamorous playboy scion of the eponymous international banking family, and his friend Anthony Blunt, an effete expert in art history whom Rothschild recommended to MI5 shortly after he joined the Service.4

Both men spent the next five years inside MI5, only departing, along with Petrie, in the wholesale exodus of its wartime recruits in 1945. But each – for very different reasons – was to become a dominant figure throughout Peter Wright’s career.

Petrie’s replacement was an unpopular choice inside the Security Service. Sir Percy Sillitoe was a career policeman; now 58, he had been chief constable of a succession of forces where he had earned plaudits for introducing the use of radio communication between squad cars and their headquarters, and for breaking the power of Glasgow’s notorious razor gangs in the interwar period. But to the rarified minds of MI5’s senior management – several of whom had unsuccessfully applied for the top job – Sillitoe was a plodding flatfoot whose appointment ‘puts the stamp of the Gestapo on the [Security Service]’ and ‘generally downgrades the office’;5 he had also committed the unpardonable sin of having a very public profile.

Sillitoe had, however, a very powerful backer: Clement Attlee. The Prime Minister, like many in the new post-war Labour government, harboured a lingering distrust of MI5 – a misgiving dating back to the Zinoviev letter scandal two decades earlier.6 Attlee led the charge for his man, and Sillitoe entered the DG’s office on 1 May 1946.

He arrived with little knowledge of the organisation’s structure and, aside from a firm conviction that Soviet communism had infected the gilded generation who had studied at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the 1930s – ‘long haired intellectuals’ as he habitually scorned them7 – even less understanding of what the Security Service should actually do. Additionally, as he admitted on his retirement, from the very beginning he had held an outsider’s distrust of the cloak of secrecy under which the Service sheltered.

Sillitoe’s bemusement was understandable. Although the Security Service had been at work for more than 30 years, he discovered that there appeared to be no legal basis for its existence and precious little in the way of control over how it operated.

The first – indeed only – official document setting out its purpose and functions had been written six months earlier and, in keeping with Britain’s habitual addiction to secrecy, had never been distributed outside a very narrow circle.9 It was also remarkably short on formal guidance.

The Service’s democratic parentage and its operating budget were equally opaque. Notionally, it was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, while its funds were allocated by the Treasury on the recommendation of a mysterious body known as ‘The Secret Vote Committee’. In practice, the former had little, if any, control over what MI5 got up to, while the latter never actually met.11 Instead, the Director General was expected to calculate the cost of defending the realm and pass his estimate to the Prime Minister, who would – without consulting Parliament – ensure that the requested quantity of taxpayers’ money quietly landed in the Security Service’s bank.

‘I realised,’ Sillitoe recalled, ‘that I had a big job and heavy responsibilities, but I thought I could tackle them adequately with common sense and energy, a fresh outlook on old obstacles and an enterprising approach to new...