Awakening of Spies

A few weeks earlier the cabin crew had been wearing the uniform of British European Airways. Now they were part of the brave new world of the recently formed British Airways. I hoped they were facing a brighter future than I was. My first mission had been a complete disaster.

I was met at Heathrow by an unsmiling man who led me to a windowless room, pointed to a telephone and told me I was to ‘phone the office’.

I was put through to Adam Joseff who quizzed me for five minutes before suddenly breaking off. ‘Sorry, Christopher Watkins is on the other line. Come on in Thomas. There should be a pool driver waiting for you.’

I did as I was told. The pool driver had been listening to the latest Eurovision winner, ABBA singing about Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Not entirely inappropriate. He switched the radio off when I emerged and said nothing the whole way in from the airport.

Joseff’s enormous office, rather than the DG’s, was the effective nerve centre of the organisation. Although Joseff always seemed to be organised and methodical in his actions the room itself was invariably chaotic, with metal chairs scattered around and usually a flip chart propped against a wall.

His office could have been designed by a machine. Everything appeared to be numbered: the heavy metal door inscribed ‘Mark IV Manifoil C127732 M4’ beneath its combination lock; 01 66 533 stencilled on the metal desk. Even his pencils were marked ‘Government Property 48-75’. It was a cold room, the walls a faded green, the ceiling too high. The green carpet failed to reach the walls. Watkins had found a similar carpet in his office when he arrived and had fought for three months to have it changed. He had been successful, as he had been in his campaign for a wooden desk. Joseff remained content with things as they were. As well as his metal desk there was a metal table, both invariably covered in papers that he scrupulously put away in his safe every night. On the desk sat a leather jar containing pens and pencils, a letter opener and a box full of paper clips and treasury tags. Four briar pipes stood in their rack beside a gold table lighter inscribed ‘To Adam J. Joseff from his friends at GCHQ.’ It bore no date.

The only other sign of individuality was a single framed poster of a nineteenth-century Portuguese postage stamp.

Joseff was on the phone. He waved a neatly manicured hand in the direction of the window where Richard Mendale was standing.

Mendale turned towards me. He was a big man, tall and straight-backed with a big, red round face who had spent his service career in the Royal Marines. I knew that the previous year the Director Operations had been seconded to Six for an operation in Warsaw involving a Russian general who was supposedly planning to defect. The operation had been an embarrassing failure.

‘Nothing much to tell,’ Mendale said, the rain pattering on the window behind him. ‘Jacobs and Watkins followed their suspect east to Nijmegen, near the German border. He went into an apartment above an antique shop. That’s all we know. Watkins says he has him cornered.’

‘He was wrong,’ interrupted Joseff, holding his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘I’ve got Watkins on the line. Our bird has flown.’

He removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘You’d better leave Ronald Jacobs to handle the police and come on home, Christopher.’ Joseff was the only person, with the exception of the DG himself, who ever called Watkins by his first name. ‘Perhaps you’d come right into the office when you land. I’ll have you met at the airport.’

There was a moment’s silence. Presumably Watkins replied because Joseff continued, ‘No, that won’t be necessary. Come back through Amsterdam.’

He put the phone down. ‘Watkins wants to drive over to Munster and let the RAF fly him back. Can’t stand the idea of having anything happen without his presence. Anyway, Samovar’s gone. Slipped out the back while Watkins was phoning us earlier. When the Dutch police arrived to put the place under observation, somebody noticed a peculiar light in one of the windows. Our friend had set the place afire. When the police broke in, the apartment was gutted.’

It was the first time I had heard the American expression ‘amateur hour’ and it struck me as highly appropriate. Joseff ignored it. ‘We’ll get some of the small fry and the ring is broken. It’s just that the lynchpin has escaped. Watkins reckons he’ll be back inside Russia within a few hours. Let’s hope he’s wrong.’

‘Fat chance of that,’ put in Mendale, voicing all our thoughts. We were all wrong.

Once more I went over the events in Holland. Mendale was particularly interested in the men who jumped me.

‘The descriptions could fit half the Dutch population,’ he commented. ‘Let’s hope the photos come out. What about the gun, you didn’t find it?’

‘Ah,’ said Mendale quickly, ‘so there won’t be any cartridge cases lying around.’ He flashed a look at Joseff, who said nothing. It was as if Mendale was saying, ‘Look, my suspicions are confirmed.’ But it was a long time before I discovered what those suspicions were. And why nobody told me.

‘The DG will be in later,’ Joseff said. ‘He may want to see you. Perhaps you could sleep in the dormitory downstairs.’

It was his dismissal. Back in my office somebody brought up some sandwiches while I carefully wrote down my version of the day’s events. After that I tried to clear my mind by switching my thoughts to the mundane. I had attended a Middle East review meeting at the US Embassy two days before, one of those meetings where nobody wanted to give anything useful away. Now I settled down to write the required Ministerial brief: the meeting, I lied, had been a fruitful example of inter-agency cooperation.

There was still no word from the DG when I finished so I went down to the dormitory and watched television until midnight. I had plenty to think about.

I was surprised by my own reaction to the events in Zandvoort. I had almost certainly killed someone and someone had nearly killed me. I should have been in shock. What today would be labelled post-traumatic stress. And yet I felt something altogether different, something that I didn’t want to think of as pride. I had held my own. Somebody had tried to kill me but I had been the one to emerge victorious. When the shots came my autonomic nervous system would have released a barrage of hormones racing through my body. They could have triggered fight or flight. My first reaction had been to run but I had turned and fought. And I had won.

The first person I saw when I went up to my office the next morning was Watkins’ secretary, Judy Brown.

‘Mr Watkins is on the warpath,’ she warned me. ‘He wants to know why you haven’t written your report yet.’

With that Watkins appeared. ‘Ah, Thomas, you’re here. We’re to go up to Adam’s office right away. I understand the DO’s in the office, no doubt he’ll be finding fault with everything we’ve done. No need to fill me in on what happened to you in Zandvoort, I’ve read your report.’

Joseff put down the phone as we entered. Nobody would guess from his immaculate appearance that he had been there for twenty-four hours without a break.

We sat around his desk. Watkins upright, as straight as the chair back, clipboard on his knee. Mendale pushing his chair on to two legs and leaning back against a filing cabinet, while he stared out of the window. And finally myself, wedged between a filing cabinet and the door. Joseff tapped his desk with the stem of his pipe as he spoke.

‘At last we’ve got a name for Samovar: Kardosov. Dick found him in the records, recognised him from Jacobs’ photo.’

Mendale drew his eyes away from the window where the first light of dawn was awakening the building opposite. He glanced towards the desk. ‘It was pure luck really. The photo we had is nine years old.’ He pointed at a black and white snapshot on Joseff’s desk.

Watkins picked it up. ‘That’s the man. No doubt about it, that’s Samovar.’

He passed the photo to me. A man in his mid-thirties was climbing stone steps past an inscription. He looked thoroughly ordinary, short hair, hat, raincoat just below his knees.

‘New York,’ I said before Mendale could reply, ‘the steps going up to East 43rd Street, opposite the UN building.’

Mendale nodded. ‘Kardosov was there for a year on the Byelorussian delegation. As I said, nine years ago. Absolutely nothing else on him. The Americans have fingerprints which they’ve sent to the Dutch authorities. I’m sure they’ll just confirm the picture.’

‘No,’ agreed Joseff, ‘but we do have more. The message that Leonov left behind the postbox at Zandvoort station. The boys at Cheltenham have cracked it. Just a simple transformation cipher, five-digit duplication and a few dummies. Their standard B system tarted up a bit.’

Joseff loved technicalities. He was probably sorry that because of the urgency the message had been sent to Cheltenham rather than left for him to play with on the computer terminal in the second basement. He picked up a computer printout from the desk in front of him. ‘I’ll read it out. The first bit’s not too explicit but at the moment that’s not the important part:

“Thunder urgent crashdive mermaid stop remain active

Operation Ann Arbor stop use Swedish identity stop

Collect orders Copenhagen two stop danger code impossible

Stop victor stop”’.

‘They’re mad,’ Mendale said when Joseff had finished. ‘They’re going to use him again immediately. No debriefing. No analysis. No post-mortem. Nothing.’

‘Cost-effective,’ Joseff interrupted. ‘They’ve got a man in the field on our side of the curtain with a Swedish cover all ready and waiting to be used. My guess is that the man who stole this naval gadget at Ann Arbor, Paul Donnell, just saw an opportunity and grabbed it, then he somehow contacted the Russians and offered an immediate exchange. He wouldn’t want to hang around. The reds have simply gone for whoever is available. And if Donnell’s still in the US, Kardosov’s experience there will be an added reason for keeping him operational.’

‘Perhaps Donnell and Kardosov knew each other,’ Watkins suggested. ‘Donnell was over here last year. Perhaps Kardosov got on to him then.’

‘Send someone to Copenhagen,’ suggested Watkins. ‘Thomas here could go.’

‘We’ve done that already,’ Joseff said. ‘John Burton took a couple of chaps from Operations over last night, courtesy of the RAF. We were lucky. Burton has just spotted Kardosov at the civilian airport, Kastrup, checking in for a flight to Canada. Toronto. He’s using the name Nils Olssen.’

‘The Swedish identity,’ Watkins murmured, remembering the deciphered message.

‘Don’t we need someone more senior?’ Watkins asked. ‘Perhaps I should go.’

Joseff was not about to get involved in turf wars between the DO and the DAP. ‘The Director General has made his decision. He’s talked to the RCMP. They will take over the operation now and track Kardosov from the airport.’

The Canadian ‘Security Landscape’ was even more byzantine than the UK’s. At the summit was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service. We had worked closely with them in the past.

In October 1970 separatist violence in Quebec had culminated in the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange and the kidnapping of the British Trade Commissioner James Cross and a government minister, Pierre Laporte. Cross survived but the minister was murdered by his captors. The Mounties had tracked down and captured Laporte’s killers in an operation that paid no attention to legal niceties. Nobody in London was surprised a few years later when the RCMP Security Service was abolished following revelations about the tactics they had employed in Quebec. But at the time Joseff was briefing me they were still top dog in the security world and a law unto themselves.

‘The DG has arranged for one of our people over there, by the name of French, to work with the Mounties,’ Joseff continued. ‘The plan is that if Kardosov ends up in their hands the Security Service will let French and the RAF bring him back here without waiting for all the rigmarole of an extradition.’

Joseff turned to me. ‘You needn’t get involved in that. If the man who stole the Interrogator, Donnell, turns up in Toronto to meet Kardosov we want the Griffin Interrogator. That’s your objective. Bring it back here.’

‘If it’s been stolen from the Americans won’t the Canadians want to give it back to them?’ I asked. ‘Rather than letting me walk away with it.’

Mendale laughed. ‘Not after last year’s furore. There’s no love lost between the Canadians and the Americans at the moment.’

I must have looked blank because Joseff explained. ‘The Americans declassified a lot of historical files last year without apparently realising that they included details of War Plan Red.’

‘War Plan Red was a proposal developed by the US Army in 1927 to invade Canada, the plans included bombing Canadian cities. It was approved at the highest level and new airfields were specially built. Of course it never came to anything but it upset the apple cart when the files were declassified. Even after nearly half a century the Mounties don’t like the idea that American spies were carrying out reconnaissance missions in Canada without being detected.’

‘What happens if Kardosov doesn’t stay in Toronto?’ I asked. ‘Suppose he intends meeting Donnell in the US.’

‘That would be unfortunate. You and French might try to follow him. The DG has spoken to Ottawa to see if they would be willing to do anything more. But the reality is that if we think Kardosov is heading for the US we may need to let the Canadians grab him before he can cross the border and forget about the Griffin Interrogator. Six have people on the ground in Washington who might be persuaded to help but operating in the US is not easy for any of us, logistically or, more important, politically.’

‘We don’t need Six involved,’ said Mendale. ‘They’re too close to the Americans. Brasenose would be happy to sacrifice Griffin to score a few points in Langley.’

I had no idea who Brasenose was but Watkins agreed. ‘Six has to be a last resort.’

Joseff handed me a batch of files. ‘Read these, you leave here in fifty minutes. There are some logistics to fix first.’

‘No. As far as the Dutch are concerned Kardosov was followed over the border from Germany and never went anywhere near Zandvoort. We don’t want them thinking we’re poaching on their territory. And the photo Thomas took at Zandvoort station didn’t come out – too dark.’

So I was off again. Joseff must have been pleased with my performance in Zandvoort after all. Or alternatively I was being given a chance to redeem myself.

Back in my office I opened the Griffin file. Although marked ‘Office of Naval Intelligence’, it was written in the computer jargon language peculiar to the CIA’s analysts at Langley, starting with the title: ‘GRIFFIN. Garble-Recognition Interrogation-Friend-or-Foe Inboard Nautics – Master Control Unit’.

Most of the report was devoted to Griffin’s history from ‘Initial Program-Parameter Formulation’ to ‘Pre-production Prototype’. There was practically nothing on the actual mechanics other than obscure references to quartz chip technology, electrostatic units, microelectric circuitry and so on. The approximate dimensions of the stolen prototype were given as: cylindrical, length five inches, diameter two inches, both ends ‘multi-point socketed’. There was a sketch but no photographs.

The report bore another CIA hallmark; it said only what they wanted us to know: no details of Griffin’s functions or indications of what would happen if the Russians got hold of it. The CIA case officer who had sent us the report, Richard Newell, had suggested that if we needed further information we should contact him and had provided his number. I was sure that if I did so he would, in a phrase recently used in reference to a government minister, provide every form of assistance short of actual help. The Royal Navy had tried to provide more background but after reading their appendix twice I was little wiser.

The Griffin undersea interrogator was developed from the now obsolete British airborne PTR446. The appendix started with excerpts by W. Mitchell AMITPP from an old Electrical Engineering magazine, hardly top-secret, dealing with the PTR446.

Interrogation friend or foe (IFF) and

secondary surveillance radar (SSR) equipment

provides a means of interrogating aircraft by

means of specific interrogation modes, the

term modes being used to define ground-to-air

characteristics which determine the meaning

of a reply given by a transponder… Defruiting,

garble recognition and real-time coding are

additional functions of the complete system…

The PTR446 microminiaturised transponder

makes extensive use of silicon integrated circuits

…the result that the overall weight has been

reduced by a factor of six compared with

previous equipment – 3lbs 11oz for the transmitter-

receiver unit… These microelectronic

techniques are not restricted to airborne equipment

and are, in fact, employed in the latest ground-ship interrogators…

The appendix continued with a brief explanation of how the Interrogator had been adapted to undersea operations and the weight reduced. It concluded: ‘The Griffin Interrogator, of which the master control unit stolen by Donnell is the “brain”, represents a breakthrough in undersea surveillance techniques. It enables US submarines to definitively identify vessels as friendly, hostile or neutral and attack or evade when appropriate. The efficiency of US killer submarines could be increased by up to 60 per cent. More important than these gains are the losses that would be incurred if the Russians obtained Griffin. Not only is Griffin Interrogator’s technology at least six years ahead of its Soviet equivalent, but Russian knowledge of US interrogation modes would nullify the entire Griffin programme and leave Allied submarines dangerously exposed in the event of hostilities. Submarine-based first strike nuclear capacity could not be guaranteed.’

What the Navy meant was that if the Russians got Griffin they could win the next war because they would be able to launch their submarine-based missiles but we wouldn’t. It was sombre reading, even allowing for our naval colleagues’ obsessive exaggeration of the Communist menace and their belief that all wars are settled at sea.

The other two files I read quickly. The dossier on Donnell I had seen before, a photocopy of an FBI clearance we’d received when he attended a Cambridge physics symposium. Born Dublin, 1935, parents emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1939. Bachelor’s and Master’s UCLA. Naval Service Bethesda, Maryland, and Naval Telecommunications Command, Washington DC. Access to unspecified secret material. Doctorate MIT. Currently deputy co-ordinator Griffin program, University of Michigan. Unmarried. Five feet ten inches. One hundred and ninety-five pounds.

The file on Kardosov contained the photo Mendale had shown us and just three paragraphs. The first gave details from his passport, if they were correct he would now be forty-seven. The second was an unilluminating summary of his UN activities concluding: ‘subject’s primary role remains uncertain’. The third listed a confirmed sighting in Moscow six years ago in the company of known KGB executives and an unconfirmed sighting in Ankara six months later.

I had just returned the files when Watkins appeared clutching a new briefcase. ‘Follow me,’ he barked in my direction.

In his office the walls caught people’s attention. One was devoted to aviation: prints of hot air balloons and Da Vinci’s parachute; a graduation certificate from the Senior Flying Training School in Manitoba, covered with the autographs of fellow graduates; photos of the young Watkins in a Harvard trainer and beside a Mosquito, bullet holes clearly visible in the rear fuselage.

The other walls were covered with posters showing the opposition: serried rows of photos and organisational charts with titles like ‘CPSU Politburo and Secretariat’, ‘Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic Government Structure’, ‘USSR Council of Ministers’ and ‘Military Organisation of the People’s Republic of China’. They were produced by an American agency and sent to us by the dozen. Only Watkins displayed them. They served no purpose and the organogram headed ‘Government and Party Structure of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’ was long out of date, a souvenir perhaps of Watkins’ plan to create an Indochina network. As usual, his scheme had been far too elaborate, full of impossible to recruit sleeper cells with impossible to understand cut-outs. The DG had finally vetoed it and if he hadn’t Six certainly would have.

He flipped through a batch of pink FBIS daily reports to show that he was busy. The reports from the American Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service were summaries of the previous day’s Russian news broadcasts which I had soon stopped reading. When he had finished he started talking at me through his moustache.

‘Good. Langley sent us the Griffin report on Monday. Apparently it was supposed to be as secret from us as from the Russians. No wonder the Navy’s so excited.’

He opened the briefcase lying on his desk. Inside was a compartment about six inches long by three inches deep and the same wide and full of cotton wool.

‘Operations have produced this to transport Griffin, just to make sure you don’t break it. As the Americans know you we’ve arranged a cover. You’re Rupert Ashton, travel agent. There’s a profile here. Read it on the way to the airport, then give it to your driver Morgans. Don’t take it with you.’

He handed me my new passport. I wondered how anyone had been able to produce a passport with my details in so quickly but then I remembered that Watkins had wanted us to use false papers in Zandvoort. The idea had been vetoed but not before he had set the wheels in motion. Watkins also passed over the airline ticket, a roll of US and Canadian dollars and an American Express card, and pushed some travel leaflets into the briefcase.

‘French will contact you at the airport. If Donnell’s got any sense he’ll have got out of the US as fast as possible but in case he hasn’t, and you have to follow Kardosov from Toronto, there’s an American multiple-entry visa in the passport. I hardly need tell you to be cautious in the US, we can’t afford another Lechlade.’

Robert Lechlade was a CIA analyst who had offered to sell us material we wouldn’t normally see. Although the special relationship with the US meant that any intelligence we acquired was automatically shared with the Americans it didn’t always work the other way round. We bought reports from Lechlade for eighteen months until, somehow, he was blown. All hell broke loose. Vitriolic recriminations flew across the Atlantic and only assurances from Downing Street that it wouldn’t happen again maintained the surface cooperation of the two services. It would be unwise to tread on American toes and this operation was blatantly poaching on their territory. We should have told the FBI about Kardosov and kept our noses out of it. Just as we should have told the Dutch BVD about Leonov and let them monitor the Zandvoort drops.

‘Remember,’ Watkins concluded. ‘Your target is the Interrogator. Bring that back and there will be champagne all round. If the Canadians are as good as everybody says they are it should be easy. Let French look after Kardosov.’

‘No, someone from Washington or Ottawa I suppose. Probably an old crony of the DG. As you heard I offered to go myself but clearly I’m needed here.’

I collected my standby suitcase and went to find Morgans, one of the pool drivers. I was surprised to find Mendale waiting with him.

The Director Operations took me aside. ‘Let the Canadians handle things,’ he said. ‘You were lucky in Zandvoort, don’t try to be a hero again. Your role this time is delivery boy, just bring Griffin back.’

Once in the car I opened the personality profile. Rupert Stanley Ashton. Home: Watford. Wife: Maureen. Children: John and Sandra. Occupation: travel agency manager, Leadenhall. Hobbies: golf, travelling, music. They’d made me two years older.

Morgans weaved expertly through the traffic, not hesitating to put his foot down when there was the smallest gap ahead.

‘Why do we pay for police driving courses,’ I asked, ‘when you could teach us?’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ Morgans replied. ‘That’s professional grade, I’m a mechanic.’

I sat back after that masterpiece of Civil Service logic. What grade was I? The thought still nagged away at the back of my mind: I was just a delivery boy but even so Operations must have had a host of people better qualified than me. Why had I been chosen?