THE FOLLOWING CHAPTER describes a selection of some of the more unusual situations with which the Branch has been called upon to deal.
Little has been written in this history, with the notable exception of the arrest of ‘the Belfast Ten’, about the vital role played in the effective functioning of Special Branch by those officers performing duty at port. Virtually every Special Branch section, not to mention other agencies, benefited from their unobtrusive yet thoroughly efficient methods in assisting their colleagues to deal with protection, counter-terrorism, foreign and domestic extremism. Other branches of the police service have also been grateful for their assistance in, for example, the apprehension of wanted criminals and, in some cases, the detection of crimes committed by passengers in transit.
On 29 December 1973, an attractive Californian teenager, Allison Thompson, arrived at Heathrow Airport from America with the unlikely story that, although she only had £10 in cash on her, she was here for a month’s holiday. Immigration officials asked customs officers to search her baggage, a large trunk adorned with a flamboyant black and white chequered design. It was discovered that the box had a false bottom, which concealed five handguns and 150 rounds of ammunition. Thompson, seemingly unaware of its contents, claimed that she had been asked by her boyfriend, later identified as Abdelkebir El-Hakkaoui, a Moroccan, to bring the trunk to London, where she would be met by a man she did not know, who would identify her by her distinctive trunk.
At this stage, Metropolitan Police from Ealing were called in and one of them spotted a likely candidate for her unknown contact lurking in the shadows near the arrival hall. In fact, he was known to Thompson, he was her boyfriend, El-Hakkaoui. As the case began to assume the characteristics of a terrorist plot, the senior Special Branch officer at the airport, Detective Superintendent Don Ginn, was informed. Ginn, unusually for a senior Special Branch officer, had a wealth of operational CID experience and decided that Special Branch would deal with the case. SB airport officers did not normally handle their own cases and DS Dewi Jones, DC Cracknell and others welcomed the opportunity to be actively involved rather than act as ‘agents’ for the CID. Within two days of El-Hakkaoui’s and Thompson’s detention, a third member of what transpired to be a conspiracy arrived at Heathrow Airport to be promptly arrested by SB officers; he was a Pakistani student named Ather Naseem.
After extensive questioning by Ginn and his team, it emerged that El-Hakkaoui, a supporter of a Moroccan anti-royalist organisation, UMFP, dedicated to the ‘liberation’ of the country, needed the firearms, which would be transferred to France at a later date, where they would be used to carry out a plot to kidnap a senior French government official as a hostage for the release of thirty Moroccan political prisoners. The scheme was the brainchild of El-Hakkaoui, who persuaded Naseem to assist him and duped another girl, Giulia McCartney, to accompany him to the airport to collect the case from Thompson.
On 17 May 1974, the three appeared at the Old Bailey, when El-Hakkaoui was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment and Naseem to twelve months for the unlawful possession of firearms. The two men both supported Allison Thompson when she denied any knowledge of the contents of her trunk; she was acquitted on a similar charge but was detained for questioning by the FBI on her return to the USA, together with others in connection with the same conspiracy.
This case was unusual in that Special Branch involvement was limited to those officers employed at the airport, but it illustrated the excellent relations that existed between HM Customs, Immigration and the local police, a rapport that had been built up over many years working together. This culture was not confined to Heathrow Airport; at sea and airports throughout the country it was the ability to operate harmoniously with other agencies that epitomised Special Branch work and was an important ingredient of its success.1
Every protection assignment presents its own particular problems, never more so than the visit of Alexander Shelepin in March 1975. Shelepin, a member of the Politburo, chairman of the USSR’s central trade union council and former head of the KGB, was visiting Britain at the invitation of the Trade Union Congress in furtherance of attempts to open lines of communication with ‘trade union organisations’ in the Soviet Union. He was scarcely an ideal figure to head a ‘goodwill’ visit, as he was vilified by thousands of Jews in this country for alleged ill-treatment of Soviet Jewry in the USSR; he was also the target for the wrath of masses of Ukrainian, Lithuanian and other Soviet ethnic minorities in Britain who held him responsible, while head of the KGB, for the assassination of their leader, Stepan Bandera, and many other dissident members of the Soviet community. It was anticipated that there would be violent protests during the visit and appropriate police measures, based on Special Branch risk assessments, were prepared to guarantee Shelepin’s personal safety.
An early problem encountered by the SB personal protection team was that the trade union officials responsible for organising the visit had no experience of managing such a task, particularly one fraught with the likelihood of violent demonstrations. Arrangements for state and official government-sponsored visits are always in the very capable hands of the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the Government Hospitality Fund respectively, everybody knows what they are doing and timing is of the essence. In this case, however, with only a few days to go, only a provisional programme had been drafted and, for example, no thought had been given to transport arrangements for the visitors, which, the organisers naively believed, would be handled by the police. Another hurdle to overcome was convincing the Russian embassy that the visiting protection officers would, under no circumstances, be allowed to carry weapons. However, these and other administrative difficulties were finally sorted out, although it was with some apprehension that, on the afternoon of 31 March 1975, a team of SB personal protection officers awaited the arrival of the Soviet visitors at
Heathrow Airport’s north extension, the specialist VIP reception unit. Earlier in the day there had been a rowdy demonstration of some 3,000 protestors, mainly Ukrainians, outside the Soviet embassy in London, but there were few spectators to witness Mr Shelepin’s arrival at the airport. Nevertheless, no risks were being taken by the police – there was a very obvious uniformed presence at the airport and, in addition to Special Branch, a heavy police escort accompanied the Russian and his entourage to the embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. The first day of the visit ended peacefully with a dinner there attended by the Soviet ambassador Nikolai Lunkov, general secretary of the TUC Len Murray and other trade union officials.
The following day was more eventful. Although details of the visit had not been widely publicised, early the next morning a sizeable and vociferous crowd gathered outside Congress House, headquarters of the TUC, where it was generally (and correctly) anticipated he would be having talks with leading members of the Council. Some of the protection team, sent on in advance, reported that it would be inadvisable for Mr Shelepin to enter the building by the main door in Great Russell Street, so it was decided that he would go in through a rear entrance while a decoy car went to the front to distract the demonstrators momentarily. The plan worked, for while the advance car and its occupants were subjected to a torrent of abuse and a hail of leaflets and missiles, including a bottle of milk, on leaving the embassy and on arriving at Congress House, the car carrying Mr Shelepin safely negotiated a back street and delivered its passengers to their destination without mishap, thus averting what could have been an ‘international incident’. When the protestors realised that their prey had eluded them, there were ugly scenes and Special Branch officers assisted their uniformed colleagues in preventing a forced entry to the building. A large crowd of noisy protestors remained outside the building all day and when the day’s proceedings were completed many of them walked in an orderly fashion to the embassy, occasionally shouting ‘Ukrainian blood on your hands!’ or ‘We want Shelepin dead!’
The third day of the visit was more to the Russians’ liking. In the morning a flight in an Aeroflot aircraft took the delegation and protection officers to Scotland, far from the hostile demonstrations of London. A hastily arranged visit to a manufacturing company at Kilmarnock was followed by a quick lunch in Glasgow before a premature departure for Moscow. As a goodwill visit, this could scarcely be called a success, but from the Special Branch point of view it was a useful operation, drawing grateful thanks from Len Murray for averting what could have been a disaster at Congress House and from Mr Shelepin who expressed his personal thanks for what he called ‘a good job of work’. The Russians can never understand why public protests are allowed in this country; it is always the same when a Russian VIP visits; they insist ‘no demonstrations’ and wonder why we do not lock up all potential troublemakers for the duration of a visit!2
The following year, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrey Gromyko, visited Britain from 22 to 25 March, an event that failed to create much interest except among protest groups espousing the causes of Jewish prisoners of conscience and Soviet dissidents. The demonstrators, many of whom posed as prisoners, wearing pyjamas and shackled with chains, were markedly less rowdy than those enlivening the previous year’s visit. However, on the second day of the visit, a member of the SB protection team, Stephen Cracknell, noticed a young man behaving in a furtive manner near the ambassadors’ door of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office shortly before Mr Gromyko was due to leave after talks with our Foreign Minister. The perceptive officer, realising that he was wearing a blue and yellow scarf, the colours of the Ukrainian national flag, decided to question him. When searched, the youth – Keith Stephen Bomok from Slough, his place of birth – was found to have a hammer and anti-Soviet literature concealed beneath his coat; he was quietly arrested and given into the custody of a uniformed officer from Cannon Row Police Station, where he was charged with ‘being in possession of an offensive weapon’.3
Towards the end of 1969, it became public knowledge that the Cricket Council, the governing body of English cricket, had invited the South African Cricket Association to send a team to England in the summer to play a series of Test matches. At the time, the South African rugby team, the Springboks, was playing matches against English teams in a tour that was marked by violent demonstrations against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Frequent clashes with the police resulted in hundreds of arrests. This was part of a wider campaign directed by the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) against any sporting event featuring South African players. The intention was to focus attention on South Africa’s anti-apartheid policy by denying white South Africa any sporting outlets beyond their own country.
The ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign (STST) was formed in September 1969 by a small group of activists led by Peter Hain, the son of South African communists, and himself a young man of extreme political views. Soon after its formation, it became apparent that the STST was intent on preventing or at least seriously disrupting the South African projected cricket tour. Although it was not scheduled to start until 2 June, the Home Office began drawing up contingency plans in December 1969 by writing to relevant Chief Constables and emphasising that it was their responsibility to ‘make appropriate arrangements’. A month later, a meeting of interested parties took place at the Home Office at which the Home Secretary pointed out that the function of the police should be (i) to allow matches to be played and (ii) to deal with any threat to law and order. There was no question at this stage that the government would intervene to have the tour cancelled. The greater part of the ensuing proceedings was taken up with discussing the numbers of police likely to be required and the cost – how much and who would pay.
While these discussions were going on, the police were facing reality and preparing their own contingency plans. A central factor in formulating police strategies to counter any breaches of the peace contemplated by the militants was intelligence supplied by Special Branch in the form of regular reports to A.8 Department (responsible for the preservation of public order) and to the Home Office. These reports were prepared by DI Gerry Donker, an officer with comprehensive knowledge of South African politics, and were based on information supplied by a source close to the leadership of the STST Committee, which was supplemented by Special Branch’s coverage of STST’s meetings and rallies and by surveillance.
Regular meetings of ministers and their civil service advisers continued to be held throughout May and there was a constant flow of memoranda between departments reflecting their consternation and indecision. Throughout this period, Prime Minister Harold Wilson maintained that the government would not force the organisers to cancel the tour but, after a ministerial meeting on 21 May, the Home Secretary James Callaghan wrote to the Cricket Council asking them to withdraw the invitation to the South African touring team. The reasons given for this request at such a late hour (the touring party was due to arrive the following week) were three-fold. If the tour went ahead, (i) the burden on the police would be intolerable, (ii) a number of African countries were threatening to withdraw from the forthcoming Commonwealth games to be held in Edinburgh, and (iii) trade, and relations in general with South Africa, would suffer as a result of the extensive public disorder that would be caused.4
The tour was cancelled and as a consequence the STST Committee was disbanded, but the AAM, hoping to benefit from the public support that the campaign had attracted, planned a comprehensive programme of action directed at firms trading with South Africa. However, it failed to capitalise on a private South African amateur cricket tour of London and the Home Counties by a team named the Penguins, which took place from 4 June to 6 July. It was sponsored by Barclays Bank DCO and the team was accompanied throughout by two Special Branch officers, whose function was to liaise with local police and advise of any likely demonstrations. In the event there were no incidents marring the tour; this was one of the less demanding protection commitments undertaken by the Branch!5
Another issue involving MPSB was the highly controversial prosecution of two journalists and a former member of the Intelligence Corps on various charges under the Official Secrets Acts, a case which became known as the ABC Trial, an acronym for the names of the defendants, Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and Duncan Campbell. The prosecution had its origins in the simultaneous deportation in 1977 of two American citizens, Mark Hosenball, an investigative journalist, and Philip Agee, a former CIA agent working in this country. Hosenball’s eviction resulted from his participation in the publication in Time Out magazine in 1975 of an article dealing with the hitherto unmentionable GCHQ and other government electronic ‘listening posts’ throughout Britain and the rest of the world. In a separate case, Agee was wanted by the American authorities for exposing alleged malpractices by the CIA in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1975.6
Co-author of the article, entitled ‘Eavesdroppers’, which led to Hosenball’s deportation was an investigative journalist named Duncan Campbell; together with a fellow writer, Crispin Aubrey, he was prominent in a campaign that endeavoured to overturn the deportation orders against Agee and Hosenball. Among the many free thinkers aroused by the controversy was a former corporal in the British Army, John Berry, who had been employed in the Intelligence Corps, where he dealt with SIGINT7 material. Berry was anxious to meet Aubrey and Campbell as he wanted to give them intelligence recalled from his days as an analyst in the Intelligence Corps, which he thought they might be able to utilise. A meeting between the three took place on 18 February 1977, which was tape-recorded by Aubrey. Following the publication of the ‘Eavesdroppers’ article, MI5 and Special Branch had been maintaining surveillance on Campbell and were aware of this meeting; an SB team led by DCS Harry Nicholls arrested all three men soon afterwards. A subsequent search of Campbell’s flat revealed a vast quantity of correspondence relating to communications, SIGINT and telephone interception, also photographs of defence establishments.
In the absence of any evidence of communication with foreign intelligence services, the men were initially charged with offences under Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act of 1911, of communicating classified information to an unauthorised person (in the case of Berry) and of the unauthorised reception of classified information (in the case of Campbell and Aubrey). In May and June more serious charges under Section 1 of the Act were added, but these were quickly withdrawn. Sifting through the documents and photographs found in Campbell’s flat, evaluating the information contained on the tape recording and interviewing witnesses was a time-consuming task for the Special Branch team and, while this was going on, frantic discussions were taking place between the directors of Army, Naval and RAF Security, the permanent under secretary at the Home Office and the FCO, the Cabinet Secretary, Security Service Legal Adviser and other high-ranking officials. Their concerns were two-fold. The first problem concerned the likelihood of an appearance in open court of a responsible officer from SIGINT and what evidence he could give (the very existence of SIGINT had always been a closely guarded secret); of particular concern was the effect it would have on UK/US intelligence cooperation if ‘details of our SIGINT activities were bandied about in open court’.8
The second issue related to the suitability of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act to deal with cases such as this. Over the years there had been much public debate over the unfair restrictions that the Section imposed upon the freedom of the press; Lord Hutchinson QC, counsel for Duncan Campbell, gave voice to these misgivings when he addressed the Court before sentence was passed, referring to ‘the doubts and confusions surrounding Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act, in the shadow of which reputable and hard-working journalists had to do their work’.9 (NOTE: Section 2 was eventually replaced by the Official Secrets Act of 1989, which contained ‘provisions protecting more limited classes of official information’.)
The first trial of the three men at the Old Bailey commenced on 5 September 1978 but had to be abandoned due to the indisposition of the judge, and it was not until 17 November that sentencing was completed – the deliberations of the jury alone lasted for sixty-eight hours. The accused were all found guilty, but none of them received custodial sentences; for such serious offences they were extremely leniently dealt with, a reflection of the judge’s unease at the use of the Official Secrets Act in this case. Berry was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, and ordered to pay £250 defence costs; Campbell was conditionally discharged for three years and ordered to pay £2,200 towards the prosecution costs and £2,500 towards his defence; Aubrey was also conditionally discharged for three years, ordered to pay £2,500 towards the prosecution costs and a third of his own (unlike the others, he was not legally aided).
The trial provoked a lot of criticism from the public, which the media was not slow to encourage, for it was seen as an attempt to curb the freedom of the press and, particularly, investigative journalism. Those involved in the framing of the charges, the decision to prosecute and the presentation of the evidence were themselves concerned at the outcome of the trial and, judging from the plethora of memoranda passing between the FCO, the Security Service, Cabinet Office, Home Office and others, which apparently did not involve the police, a scapegoat was sought for the disappointing climax to their endeavours. It would appear that the police (i.e. the Special Branch) had very little influence on the management of the case, for a Ministry of Defence memorandum dated 20 June 1977 clearly stated ‘the case is being handled by the Security Service’ and elsewhere in the same document ‘both the Attorney General and the Security Service are anxious […] to secure a successful prosecution’. The Director of Public Prosecutions would have been involved before any charges were brought and the Attorney General’s fiat would have been granted before the case was brought to court. And yet, in a letter from the Secretary to the Cabinet (Sir John Hunt) to the permanent under secretary to the Home Office (Sir Robert Armstrong), dated 27 November 1978, Sir John refers to an earlier conversation between them in which they agreed that ‘the police ought to be very sure of their ground before blundering into something which could backfire’, and he comments ‘and what a backfire it has been!’ It is strange that, although the matter was ‘being handled by the Security Service’,10 Christopher Andrew, in his history of MI5, The Defence of the Realm, makes no mention of the case.
Between 1976 and 1978, a long-running industrial dispute at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Willesden, north-west London became a severe drain on police resources, involving as it did thousands of demonstrators (mainly trade unionists) confronted by hundreds of police. During that period the frequently violent day’s events on the picket lines normally dominated the headlines in the national press, and national television news programmes.
Grunwick’s was making vast profits from its business of photographic processing and finishing, which it conducted on a postal basis, receiving undeveloped films and payment by mail and returning the finished product by the same means. A large number of the firm’s workforce consisted of east African women who allegedly worked long hours in poor conditions and on comparatively low pay. In August 1976, a young Asian man was sacked and three others walked out in protest; later the same day Mrs Jayaben Desai was involved in an argument with the same manager and she too stopped work, together with her son. The following week they began picketing outside the factory gates, where they were joined by another fifty employees. Not long afterwards, they joined a trade union, APEX.
Shortly afterwards all the strikers were sacked and the strike developed into a bitter dispute between the trade unions and management, who refused to entertain any approaches from APEX to discuss reinstatement of the dismissed workers. From the spring of the following year, the local Trades Council in Brent became increasingly active in raising support for the strikers from other Trades Councils, Labour organisations and trade unions. In June, the Strike Committee led by Mrs Desai organised a mass picket, which became violent and saw eighty women arrested. The strike and the picket continued to escalate, with postal workers refusing to handle the company’s mail and sporadic picketing taking place outside shops doing business with Grunwick’s. Other large-scale pickets followed, including the famous occasion on 11 July when the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, brought hundreds of his supporters to the picket lines and, in the process, was arrested. It is estimated that over 500 arrests were made during the two years of the picketing.
Two more similar shows of worker solidarity took place in the autumn, but the industrial action gradually petered out after a Court of Inquiry, headed by Lord Scarman, condemned the mass picketing and unofficial postal blockade but recommended that Grunwick’s should recognise the trade union APEX and reinstate the sacked workers, which the firm refused to do (so much for Courts of Inquiry!). The strike was called off in July the following year.
Special Branch played an important role in police endeavours to preserve the peace. As always, the various extremist organisations, in this case particularly the Socialist Workers’ Party, strove to turn what was intended to be a peaceful picket into a confrontation with the police. In this instance it was extremely difficult to assess numbers and tactics of the demonstrators (because this is what they were) since the extremists were not cooperating with the Strike Committee any more than with the police and were changing their battle order from day to day. It was the much-maligned Special Demonstration Squad that was able to supply the uniform branch with up-to-date information on what they were likely to encounter. On most days an early-morning telephone call was made from the senior officer of the SDS to the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of ‘A’ Department, responsible for public order, giving him the latest available intelligence on the extremists’ plans for the day.
It would be wrong to imagine that the IRA represented the only terrorist threat to this country. From the beginning of the ’70s, an overspill of the Arab–Israeli conflict had begun to manifest itself in London. In December 1971, a Special Branch report, based on information from a reliable source, warned that terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had arrived in London with the intention of assassinating members of the Jordanian royal family or hijacking a plane. The intelligence was not far off the mark for, on 15 December, the car carrying Zaid al-Rifai, the Jordanian ambassador, was attacked by a young man firing a Sten gun; the ambassador escaped with minor injuries to his hand. In the next few years further reflections of the desperate, schismatic struggle in the Middle East emerged in the metropolis, most notable of which was the shooting at his St John’s Wood home in 1973 of Joseph Edward Sieff, a former chairman of Marks & Spencer and a leading British Zionist. Strongly suspected, but never charged with the offence, was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (Carlos the Jackal), who was later imprisoned by the French for other terrorist offences.
From 1977 onwards, the Middle East conflict on the streets of London intensified and by the end of 1978 there had been at least eight assassinations and numerous attempts on the lives of Arabs living in the capital. The man responsible for many of these atrocities was Abu Nidal, who had broken away from the comparatively moderate Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by Yasser Arafat to form his own, more violent group, Black September. But there were several other extreme factions, such as the PFLP, which, like Abu Nidal, could not agree on a settlement with Israel and were quite prepared to seek a solution to their problems through murder.
A catalogue of their appalling crimes is extensive; the more notorious include:
10 April 1977: Abdullah al-Hajri, former Prime Minister of North Yemen, his wife and a minister at the embassy were shot dead outside the Lancaster Hotel, Bayswater. Information supplied by a Special Branch informant named Zohair Akache as one of the gunmen. It was later learned that he had slipped out of the country soon after the assassination and later perished at Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1977 during the hijacking by the PFLP of a Lufthansa airliner.
31 December 1977: Two Syrians were killed in a car bomb attack in Mayfair.
4 April 1978: Said Hammami, the London representative of the PLO, was assassinated in his London office by Abu Nidal supporters.
10 July 1978: General Abdul Razak al-Naif, former premier of Iraq, was fatally wounded in an armed attack outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Mayfair. Two men, one an Iraqi, the other a citizen of Bahrain, were later charged with the killing.
28 July 1978: Taha Ahmed Al-Dawood, the Iraqi ambassador, escaped injury when a grenade was thrown under his car outside the embassy. Khouloud Moghrabi, a female Lebanese student, and Mahmoud Abu Naami, an Algerian mechanic, were later arrested for the attack.
21 August 1978: Two people died and nine were seriously injured when terrorists bombed and machine-gunned a coach carrying El Al aircrew in central London. An Arab, Fahad Mihyi, was subsequently charged with murder.11
This list is far from comprehensive but it illustrates the callousness and bravado displayed by terrorists involved in the seemingly insoluble Middle East crisis. Inevitably the police, particularly the Anti-Terrorist Branch and Special Branch, were engulfed in the spin-off from the violence that was unfolding on the streets of London. For their part, Special Branch were obtaining excellent intelligence from informants about the identities of the perpetrators of the crimes after they had been committed, but, regrettably, because of the complexity of the situation, with so many factions involved, each with its own particular axe to grind, it was virtually impossible to gain advance information about the terrorists’ plans. After the bombing of the El Al coach, the bitter clashes between Abu Nidal’s violent group of terrorists, the more moderate, though none the less dangerous, Palestine Liberation Organisation and other Palestinian factions entered a quieter phase after intervention by the Algerian ambassador to the Lebanon, Muhammad Yazid.
Often, like buses, breaches of the Official Secrets Acts have a habit of coming along in groups after a long period without any. Such was the case in 1982/83, when no fewer than five individuals were sent to jail for offences against the Official Secrets Acts – Geoffrey Prime was sentenced to thirty-eight years’ imprisonment on 10 November 1982 and Lance Corporal Philip Aldridge four years on 18 January 1983. The remaining three instances were dealt with by MPSB and are described in more detail below. Detective Superintendent Peter Westcott was the officer in charge of each case and they clearly illustrate how much espionage cases can differ both in character and in seriousness.
Miss Rhona Jane McIntyre Ritchie was employed at the British embassy in Tel Aviv from July 1981 as a second secretary and, from March 1982, as a first secretary. From the latter date the Security Service were receiving reports of an ongoing affair between Miss Ritchie and her opposite number at the Egyptian embassy, Rifaat al Ansari, during which she had been regularly passing secret documents to him. She was recalled to London on 14 March and immediately interviewed by MI5, to whom she confessed that she had indeed disclosed classified information to the Egyptians. As there was clear evidence of an offence under Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act of 1911, the case was handed over to Special Branch for further investigation with a view to prosecution.12
Unlike most breaches of the Official Secrets Acts, this was a comparatively straightforward investigation; after arrest by Westcott, Miss Ritchie was conveyed to Rochester Row Police Station where she was interrogated by the superintendent and DS Don Adams, to whom she admitted having passed confidential telegrams to her lover, Ansari. It was considered that disclosure of the documents, classified as confidential, did not represent a threat to national security but were rather an embarrassment to effective diplomatic relations. The prosecution relied for evidence entirely on her own admissions and the interviewing of witnesses was accordingly kept to a minimum.13
On 29 November 1982, at the Central Criminal Court, Miss Ritchie pleaded guilty to a specimen count of wrongful communication of information contrary to Section 2 (1)(a) of the Official Secrets Act of 1911. She was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment which was suspended for twelve months.
A stark contrast is provided by the case involving Professor Hugh (‘Hugo’) George Hambleton, a lecturer at a Canadian university who spied for the Russian Intelligence Service for over thirty years from 1952. Hambleton was arrested by Peter Westcott at the Royal Overseas League in the West End of London on 25 June 1982, while ostensibly en route to France for a holiday. The circumstances leading up to his arrest, and subsequently, are bizarre in the extreme.
Hambleton’s secret life as a spy for the Russian Intelligence Services was revealed to officers of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1977 after they arrested a key RIS agent employed in the USA who handled a number of spies working for the Russians. This man, Rudi Hermann, faced with the prospect of a lengthy spell in prison, agreed to co-operate with the authorities in return for immunity from prosecution. During an exhaustive debriefing he revealed the names of a number of agents he ran, including one Hugh Hambleton, who lived and worked in Canada. When, some months later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were informed of this coup, two of their representatives flew to the States to question Hermann. On their return to Canada, the RCMP carried out extensive enquiries into Hambleton’s life and background but it was not until November 1979 that they took positive action.
Early in the morning on 4 November, RCMP officers called at his apartment in Quebec with a search warrant and for the next eight hours carried out a rigorous examination of his home; a similar operation was performed at his Ottawa property. They took away a large quantity of documents, a radio, a decoder and other spying equipment. He was not arrested but told they would be back the following day to carry out a full interview. Over the next eighteen months the RCMP constantly harried him and interviewed him on no fewer than thirteen occasions. These interviews were carried out in a seemingly friendly fashion and Hambleton spoke at length about his contacts with the RIS, although initially the period before 1962 was almost totally ignored; he created the false impression of a modest, pleasant, frugally living professor.
The RCMP were anxious to arrest and charge him but, to their frustration, the Canadian solicitor general offered him immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation with the security services. He readily agreed. In taking the decision to make the offer, the Liberal government, which had just ousted the Conservatives, had apparently decided that there was insufficient evidence to take action under the Official Secrets Act. The decision not to prosecute provoked heated discussion in the Canadian Parliament and although the government claimed that the decision was made on the grounds of national security, it was generally considered that the most likely reason was political.
From this point onwards, Hambleton, reassured by the promise of immunity from prosecution, spoke more freely about his cooperation with the RIS, which covered the period from 1956 when he was working for NATO in Paris and had access to ‘top secret’ material. In June 1982, Hambleton told his tormentors from the RCMP that he proposed to take his son on holiday to Europe and would be staying overnight in London on the night of the twenty-second; he was repeatedly advised by the RCMP that he might be arrested if he travelled to the UK, but this advice was ignored.14 The RCMP dispatched their dossier on the case to MI5, MPSB was informed and Westcott was duly handed a hot potato.15
When Hambleton arrived at Heathrow Airport, there was some confusion as to what should be done with him but he was eventually allowed to proceed to his hotel, the Royal Overseas League in Mayfair, where Westcott met him for the first time in his bedroom the following morning and arrested him. He was conveyed to Rochester Row Police Station where he was charged and, over the course of the next three days, under interrogation by Westcott and DS Adams, made a full confession of his spying activities in a statement running to over 270 pages.
Having been interrogated so many times by the RCMP, his confession was well-rehearsed and his answers to the two officers’ questions varied little from what he had already repeated many times over in Canada. His father was British but he was born in Canada and therefore had dual nationality. He was educated in the United Kingdom and Canada and spent part of his childhood in France, where his father was a press reporter. According to his statement, from 1944 he served variously with the Free French Army in Algiers, with the United States Army and with the Intelligence Branch of the Canadian Army (at his subsequent trial Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General, completely debunked these claims).
Westcott carefully took him through the next part of his narrative, for this was at the core of his spying activities. After studying economics at the Sorbonne until 1956, he began working for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Paris; he was employed there for five years, during which time he sent regular supplies of classified information, ranging from ‘confidential’ to ‘top secret’, to his Russian handlers. Every Friday he turned on his radio to receive messages in Morse code from Moscow. He would remove documents from his office, photograph them and clandestinely hand the film over to Russian agents at night in darkened streets or on the Métro. One lighter side of an otherwise tedious interrogation was Hambleton’s reference to one of his coded messages from Moscow; he found decoding a lengthy and complicated process and was not overjoyed after grappling with one particularly irksome message to discover it was merely wishing him a ‘Happy Birthday’. During one interview, Hambleton remarked, ‘There is a sense of excitement, there is a sense of camaraderie with the person who is looking after you.’
When he left Paris in 1961, he came to London to study for a PhD at the London School of Economics and, in 1964, complete with doctorate, he became a professor of economics at Laval University in Quebec. From that time onwards he appeared to have acted as a talent-spotter for the Russians. His role as a spy was brought to an abrupt end with the arrest by the FBI of his supervisor, Rudolph Hermann, and the beginning of the RCMP’s investigation into his life of espionage. The Canadian police had mixed feelings about his insistence on travelling to England and risking prosecution; on the one hand they wanted him brought to justice for what he had done but on the other hand, after all the time they had spent on the case, they wanted to do it themselves. They repeatedly warned Hambleton that if he travelled to England he might be arrested – but he did, and he was. Their Inspector Frank Pratt who, with Sergeant Robert McIlroy, had carried out all the interrogations of Hambleton in Canada, co-operated fully with the Metropolitan Police and expressed himself delighted with the ultimate outcome.
At the trial at the Old Bailey in December 1982, Westcott was questioned at length about his interviews with the accused, but Inspector Pratt was not required to give evidence. This was a high-profile case; apart from Pratt, other persons attending court were a representative from the French Directorate of Territorial Security (DST), to refute Hambleton’s claim that he had been a French double agent, and the Director General of the Canadian Security Service, as well as members of the British Security Service. On 7 December 1982, Hambleton was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for passing top-secret NATO documents to the RIS, contrary to Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act of 1911. Another charge of obtaining information likely to be useful to an enemy between 1956 and 1979 was not proceeded with. He served part of his sentence in Gartree top-security prison, Leicester, and was transferred to a Canadian prison in 1986. He was finally released under supervision in March 1989.
Michael Bettaney, born in 1950, was a member of MI5 who demonstrated that it is easier to get employment with the domestic security services than it is to enter the intelligence network of Russia as a spy. He became a member of MI5 in 1974 after graduating from Pembroke College, Oxford, where he had already appeared to disqualify himself from employment in any form of classified work through his public declarations of admiration for Adolf Hitler, his penchant for singing pro-Nazi songs, a conviction for drunkenness, fare-dodging on the railway, heavy drinking and various other displays of character defects. The Bettaney case was as much an indictment of MI5 management as it was an espionage investigation.16
Nevertheless, these failings did not seem to hinder his progress in the Service and, by 1983, he had steadily achieved an average level of advancement and was now employed on the Russian desk. In hindsight and to the average ‘man in the street’, his behaviour was of a most bizarre character and when information of a leak from within the Security Service was received from the much-trusted defector, Oleg Gordievsky, it was not difficult for the investigators to focus their attention on Bettaney.
Bettaney’s treachery began in April 1983 when this highly unpredictable intelligence officer pushed through the letter box of the Holland Park residence of Arkadi Guk, head of the KGB station in London, an envelope containing secret documents, the offer of further classified information and instructions on how to contact him. The Russian, believing it to be a provocation designed to trap him, did not respond. When the Security Service learned, through an informant within the embassy, that a second package had been delivered to Guk, it became obvious that the source was within the Security Service and soon the search for the culprit was confined to ‘K’ Branch, in which Bettaney was employed. By August, his behaviour, even more bizarre than usual, had convinced the MI5 hierarchy that he was the traitor in their midst. Without sufficient evidence for a successful prosecution, it was decided to confront Bettaney with the case against him and hope for a confession, which came after nearly two days of questioning. As soon as he indicated that he wished to make a confession, MPSB were informed and Detective Superintendent Westcott, accompanied by DS Adams, arrived at MI5’s Gower Street headquarters to arrest Bettaney and convey him to Rochester Row Police Station – this was on 16 September 1983.17
The investigation team was faced with a relatively straightforward task in obtaining sufficient evidence to charge him with having committed offences under the Official Secrets Act of 1911. He seemed only too willing to confess that on more than one occasion he had posted classified documents through the letterbox at the KGB resident’s address in Holland Park. The team charged with the task of searching his house in Cousldon, Surrey, could not have had an easier task, as he told them exactly where to find a number of secret documents, which were hidden precisely where he had indicated. This was useful information as it rebutted any possible suggestion by his defence that they had been ‘planted’. During his comparatively brief interrogation (compared with, for example, that of Hambleton), he spoke at some length, and with some obvious conceit, about his use of tradecraft, for example leaving chalk marks at Underground stations and hiding film of secret material in the cisterns in public conveniences.
Those Special Branch officers with whom he came into contact could not understand how such an apparently insecure and confused individual, with an obvious alcohol problem, could have been engaged in such sensitive employment for so long. What puzzled them particularly was what motivation he had for carrying out his acts of treachery. MI5 were just as mystified and Bettaney himself said little to solve the mystery. He is reported to have told his Security Service interrogators before his arrest: ‘There was no simple motive, it was a cumulative process […] I have put the Service in a bloody position but it wasn’t my intention.’18
On 16 April 1984, at the Old Bailey, Bettaney was convicted on ten counts under the Official Secrets Act of 1911 and sentenced to twenty-three years’ imprisonment; much of the evidence during the trial was heard in camera. He was released in May 1998.19
During the ’70s and ’80s a lot of changes in structure and personnel, many of which affected Special Branch, took place at New Scotland Yard. In 1977, Sir Robert Mark was replaced as Commissioner by Sir David McNee, Chief Constable of Strathclyde; another Scotsman, ‘Jock’ Wilson, a former chief superintendent in Special Branch, was shifted from the post of Assistant Commissioner (Crime) to AC (Traffic). In the same year, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vic Gilbert left the Met to be Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire and DAC ‘Bob’ Bryan became head of Special Branch, a post he held for the next four years before DAC Colin Hewett was transferred from ‘A’ Department to replace him, a novel appointment since never before had an officer been transferred from another police department to head the Branch. Hewett had only two commanders under him – Operations (Rollo Watts) and Administration, including protection (Philip Saunders); the post of Commander Ports had disappeared in 1978 when provincial forces assumed responsibility for a Special Branch presence at those ports within their jurisdiction. Under the commanders, seven chief superintendents managed the squads: ‘A’ – protection and general administrative matters; ‘B’ – Irish extremists; ‘C’ – domestic extremists; ‘D’ – Naturalisation; ‘E’ – foreign extremists; ‘P’ – Ports; ‘S’ – embracing the special demonstration squad, photographic, surveillance and European liaison sections. Within these squads, smaller specialist sections were continually springing up like so many mushrooms. For example, a European liaison section under a superintendent reflected the increasing interaction between MPSB and its equivalent police departments on the Continent; this section, staffed by officers with linguistic ability, also provided assistance to other branches in the Metropolitan Police and provincial forces. A training section ran courses for new recruits to the rapidly increasing number of provincial Special Branches and for officers performing duty at ports.
By 1980, the strength of the Branch stood at an all-time high of over 400 men with the return of a number of officers from the Anti-Terrorist Branch (formerly the Bomb Squad). The establishment now included ten women officers, a great asset, especially in the fields of surveillance and protection. Another development in the Branch’s history took place in the early part of 1978 when the newly installed Commissioner, Sir David McNee, withdrew MPSB officers from all ports with the exception of Heathrow Airport and the Port of London. Coverage of the Night Ferry continued until 31 October 1980, when the service was terminated; no longer was it possible to board a train in London and alight in France, with only the slightest of breaks in the journey across the Channel, but already plans were afoot to replace the Golden Arrow (Flèche d’Or) with what was to become the Eurostar, Channel Tunnel service.
During DAC Bryan’s period at the helm, a transformation of seismic proportions was taking place in Special Branch Registry. A time-consuming process of back-record conversion was undertaken as part of the computerisation of all the Yard’s specialist records. When completed, the new system permitted instant access on visual display units installed in SB offices at the Yard and at Heathrow Airport to all the Branch’s records, formerly stored on bulky files and accessed through equally bulky card indices. Appropriate security measures were installed to ensure that only suitably vetted personnel could access the more sensitive records. There is no doubt that the new computerised system was a tremendous improvement on the archaic methods it replaced, both in speed and in versatility. Special Branch Registry was now a highly professional, integral section of MPSB, run by a senior executive officer and staffed by civilians, predominantly female, who were all positively vetted and had their own career structure. Following the publication of the Radcliffe Report in 1962, it became a requirement, broadly speaking, for anyone in a position allowing access to classified material to be positively vetted. A section comprising four inspectors was set up in Special Branch to carry out this function.
1 Recollections of Dewi Jones and Steve Cracknell; Daily Express, 18 May 1974; Contemporaneous editions of The Times
2 Personal reminiscences of the writer
3 Personal reminiscence of the writer and DC Steve Cracknell
4 TNA FCO 45/728
5 Personal recollection of David Yeadell
6 Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London: Allen Lane, 1975)
7 SIGINT – Signals intelligence obtained through the interception of communications
8 TNA DEFE 47/34 E22
9 The Times, 18 November 1978
10 TNA DEFE 47/34
11 The above details are taken from contemporaneous editions of The Times
12 Hansard, 28 July 1983
13 This information was supplied by former Detective Superintendent Peter Westcott
14 The first part of this account of the Hambleton case is based on reports in the New York Times, The Times and on extracts from the book written by his friend, Leo Heaps, Thirty Years With the KGB: The Double Life of Hugh Hambleton (London: Methuen, 1984)
15 The remainder of the account is based on D. Supt. Westcott’s recollections of the case and on contemporaneous press reports
16 Hansard, 17 January 1989
17 The Bettaney Case, prior to arrest – Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 714–21
18 Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, p. 720
19 The Bettaney case, post arrest, is based on Det. Supt. Westcott’s recollections