Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:41:20 +0100

Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography

From: Mike Smith <parellic[at]googlemail.com>
To: John Young <jya[at]pipeline.com>
Cc: John Alexander Symonds <nelly_symonds[at]sky.com>

Dear John,

I attach the true life story of John Alexander Symonds (known as the KGB Romeo Spy) for
you to publish on Cryptome. John said he much admires the work you have done with
Cryptome over the years and he wanted you to be the first to hear about the publication of his
book today.

With an introduction by leading intelligence expert Nigel West, this is the first time that John
has published such a comprehensive description of how he came to work for the KGB, his
missions across the globe, and his eventual return to Britain to tell his story.

All John asks, is could you please include a link back to his website:

http://www.johnalexandersymonds.com

so that anybody who wants to contact him can send him a message.

Kind regards,
Michael John Smith

© Copyright John Alexander Symonds 2010 Page | 0

 ROMEO SPY

This is a Final Draft

by
John Alexander Symonds

With an Introduction

By
Nigel West

© Copyright John Alexander Symonds 2010 Page | 1

 Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

I Encounter in Morocco

II Bulgaria

III Moscow

IV India

V Australia

VI London

VII Mitrokhin

VIII HOLA

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 Abbreviations

ACC Assistant Commissioner, Crime

ASIO Australian Security Intelligence
Organization
BfV Federal German Security Service
BND Federal German Intelligence Service
BOSS South African Bureau of State Security
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CID Criminal Investigation Division
CPGB Communis Party of Great Britain
DAC Deputy Assistant Commissioner
DCI Detective Chief Inspector
DCS Detective Chief Superintendent
DI Detective Inspector
DPP Director of Public Prosecutions
DS Detective Sergeant
FCD First Chief Directorate
FRG Federal Republic of German
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters
GDR German Democratic Republic
GRU Soviet Military Intelligence Service
HVA East German Intelligence Service
JIC Joint Intelligence Committee
KDS Bulgarian Security Service
KGB Soviet Intelligence Service
MI5 British Security Service
NKVD Soviet Intelligence Service
NSA American National Security Agency
OPS Obscene Publications Squad
PUS Permanent Under-Secretary
REME Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers
SCD Second Chief Directorate
SHAPE Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe
SIS British Secret Intelligence Service
StB Czech Intelligence Service
SVR Russian Federation Intelligence Service
YCL Young Communist League

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 Introduction

In the middle of March 1992 an elderly, shabbily-dressed Russian

carrying a battered suitcase walked into the British Embassy in the
Latvian capital of Riga and asked to see a member of the British Secret
Intelligence Service. He was insistent, and eventually he was shown into
an interview room, usually used by visa applicants, where he was spoken
to by a young woman who was to serve him with a cup of tea, and
transform her career over the next few minutes. The woman did not
introduce herself as a diplomat, and was actually the embassy’s secretary.
Although the man wanted to speak to an intelligence officer, there was no
SIS officer, and no local station commander. That station might have
consisted of an officer and an SIS secretary, two intelligence
professionals at the front line during the collapse of the Soviet Bloc,
representing a clandestine organisation, headed at its headquarters in
London by Sir Colin McColl, but SIS had not been operational in the
newly independent republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia since
before the Second World War. The British embassy was accommodated
in the International Trade Centre, a building that had previously housed
the Communist Party’s central committee, and the staff consisted of the
Russian-speaking ambassador, Christopher Samuel, his first secretary,
Mike Bates, one secretary, and Steve and Margaret Mitchell, a husband
and wife team from the Stockholm embassy who acted as the embassy’s
secretary and the archivist. The embassy had been opened the previous
October, when it had consisted of Samuel’s hotel room, a satellite phone,
a bag of money under his bed and a Union Jack on his door. In a similar,
simultaneous exercise, Michael Peat had been sent to Vilnius and Bob
Low to Tallin.

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 The elderly Russian, who had arrived on the overnight train from
Moscow, spoke no English, but explained that his name was Major Vasili
Mitrokhin, formerly of the KGB. He said he was aged sixty-nine, and had
joined the KGB in 1948. Reaching into his bag, under a pile of what
appeared to be dirty laundry and the remains of several meals, he
removed a removed a pair of school exercise books. Inside, written in
neat Cyrillic script, was a sample of what was to become one of the
greatest intelligence coups of the era. Although this strange offering had
failed to impress the CIA Chief of Station across town at the American
Embassy, the person Mitrokhin took to be his British counterpart was
astounded, not just by the content, but by her visitor’s extraordinary tale.
He claimed that from late 1956 until his retirement in 1984 he had been in
charge of the KGB’s archives at the First Chief Directorate’s
headquarters at Yasenevo, on the Moscow ring road. For the previous
twenty-five years, since the premature conclusion of his only overseas
assignment, to Israel, he had supervised the tens of thousands of files that
had been accumulated by the world’s largest and most feared intelligence
agency, and had taken the opportunity to read many of the most
interesting ones. Astonishingly, he had spent twelve of those years, and
much of his retirement, reconstructing his own version of what he
regarded as the most significant dossiers, documenting Stalin’s crimes,
Khrushchev’s follies, Brezhnev’s blunders and the many misdeeds
committed in the name of Soviet Communism. For most of his career, he
said, he had been disenchanted with the Soviet system, had listened to
western radio broadcasts and read dissident literature. In 1972, when he
was made responsible for checking the First Chief Directorate files being
transferred from the old headquarters in the Lubyanka, to the KGB’s
modern building on the outskirts of Moscow, he embarked on what

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amounted to the construction of an illicit history of the Soviet Union’s
most secret operations.

Could the material be genuine? Was this strange, shambling figure

a Walter Mitty fantasist? Why had he been turned away by the CIA?
Would it have been possible for the KGB’s security to have been
breached in such an amateurish way? Mitrokhin asserted that he had
simply copied the original files and walked out of the heavily-guarded
KGB compound with his hand-written notes stuffed into his socks. He
had then rewritten a detailed account of the files from his scraps of paper
into exercise books and other convenient binders which he had hidden in
a milk churn concealed under his country dacha. In return for political
asylum for himself and his family he was willing to offer his entire
collection, amounting to a full six cases of documents. Furthermore, he
was willing to collaborate with SIS so the material could be properly
interpreted and eventually published, and he promised to return on 9
April with more samples of his handiwork. On that date he was met by a
delegation of SIS officers who examined some two thousand sheets of his
archive and scrutinized his Party membership card and his KGB
retirement certificate. Acknowledging the authenticity of what he had
shown them, a further appointment was made two months’ hence to meet
the man now codenamed GUNNER by SIS, and on 11 June he returned to
Riga carrying a rucksack containing yet more material.

GUNNER’s documents looked sensational, but why had he been

rejected by the CIA? This remains something of a mystery, if not an
embarrassment at the CIA’s headquarters, but the then chief of the
Soviet/Eastern Europe Division, Milton Bearden, has acknowledged that
he was besieged with offers from potential defectors in the months

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following the Soviet collapse, and as each authentic source was receiving
an average of a million dollars, and he was receiving one worthwhile
offer every forty days, the Directorate of Operations was simply running
out of money and failed to take the shambling old man sufficiently
seriously. Bearden had been assigned to language training in preparation
for his appointment as Chief of Station in Bonn, with John MacGaffin as
his replacement, and Tom Twetton had just become Deputy Director for
Operations. Somehow, in the confusion at Langley and maybe a screw-up
in Riga where Ints Silins was the US Ambassador, Mitrokhin had been
rejected. Whatever the excuse, Paul Redmond, the CIA’s chief of
counter-intelligence, was later to agree that the CIA had missed a golden
opportunity, leaving him to SIS’s tender mercies.

Mitrokhin was to undergo further interviews in England early in

September 1992, when he spent almost a month in the country under
SIS’s protection, staying at safe-houses. When he returned to Moscow on
13 October he did so for the last time and less than a month later, on 7
November, he accompanied his family to Latvia and was issued with
British passports enabling them to fly to London.

The details of how Mitrokhin subsequently made a second journey

to Riga, accompanied by his wife and son, remain classified, as do the
circumstances in which an SIS officer later visited his empty dacha
outside Moscow and recovered his secret hoard of papers and carried
them undetected to the local SIS station, headed by John Scarlett at the
British Embassy. Now codenamed JESSANT, no official announcement
was made of Mitrokhin’s defection, and in the chaos of 1992 his
disappearance from the Russian capital probably went unnoticed. His
existence in the archives had been a solitary existence, and he was

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unpopular with his colleagues, considered an awkward stickler for
regulations, unwilling to speed up bureaucratic procedures when offered
the customary bottle of vodka as an inducement. However, in the months
that followed, numerous counter-intelligence operations were mounted
across the globe, each resulting in a stunning success. Near Belfauz,
Switzerland, booby-trapped caches of weapons and covert radio
equipment were dug up in the forest; In Tampa, Florida, retired US Army
Colonel George Trofimoff was approached by FBI special agents posing
as Russian intelligence officers, to whom he admitted in a secretly
videotaped meeting lasting six hours that he had spied for the Soviets for
twenty-five years since his recruitment in Nuremberg in1969; In
Australia a senior ASIO analyst was identified as a long-term source for
the KGB, but he was not arrested; In a motel in Virginia a former
National Security Agency cryptographer, codenamed DAN by the KGB,
was detained and charged with espionage. No public statements were
issued, but in Moscow the KGB’s successor organisation, the SVR, began
to count the accumulating losses. Well-established assets in every corner
of the world were being ‘wrapped-up’ in a series of operations that
amounted to a colossal intelligence disaster of unprecedented proportions.
George Trofimoff, codenamed ANTEY, MARKIZ and KONSUL in
Mitrokhin’s files, resulted in the imprisonment of the most senior
American army officer ever to be charged with espionage.

In London, Mitrokhin’s arrival and resettlement was but part of a

project that was to have lasting consequences. After so many years
confined to Moscow he found it hard to adapt to life in England, and to
the detriment of his health he concentrated on supervising the transfer of
his precious archive onto a massive computer database. As each new case
was revealed, SIS despatched a suitably sanitized summary to the

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appropriate allied security or intelligence agency to exploit, seeking in
return only an assurance that the secret source of the information should
not be disclosed. On only one occasion, the prosecution of the NSA
analyst Robert Lipka in 1997, was there a request that Mitrokhin travel to
Philadelphia to testify in person to the origin and authenticity of his
dossier, but in the end the spy’s plea of guilty to a single charge of
espionage obviated the need for him to appear as a witness. Lipka was
sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment in September 1997,
completely baffled as to how the FBI had tracked him down after a gap of
twenty-three years.

One of SIS’s many satisfied customers was the British Security

Service, MI5, which was provided with tantalising glimpses into how the
KGB had operated in Britain over more than six decades. Where mere
suspicions had been marked on personal files, Mitrokhin confirmed guilt
of espionage; when an MI5 investigation had been shelved for lack of
progress, Mitrokhin supplied additional leads. And in the case of Melita
Norwood, a life-long Communist believed to have once operated as a spy,
Mitrokhin revealed that she was HOLA and had been in contact with
KGB’s illegal rezident in London until January 1961. Born in London in
1912 of an immigrant Latvian bookbinder named Sirnis, Melita had been
a member of the CPGB and had been linked to Percy Glading in 1938
when the former CPGB National Organiser was imprisoned for
espionage. Her name, and her family’s address in Hampstead were found
in a notebook owned by Glading at the time of his arrest, when he was
charged with stealing secrets from the Woolwich Arsenal, but MI5 had
not pursued the clue. Later she had joined the headquarters of the British
Non-Ferrous Metals Association in Euston as a typist for one of its
directors, G.J. Bailey, and this had given her access to nuclear secrets as

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the organisation was a component of the Anglo-American project to
develop an atomic bomb, which the NKVD had dubbed Operation
ENORMOZ. In 1964 she had been tentatively identified as the spy
codenamed TINA who had been mentioned in a single VENONA
message from Moscow dated 16 September 1945. According to the text
transmitted to the rezident in London, ‘her documentary material on
ENORMOZ is of great interest and represents a valuable contribution to
the development of the work in this field’. However, the addressee,
Konstantin Kukin, had been directed to ‘instruct her not to discuss her
work with us with her husband and not to say anything to him about the
nature of the documentary material which is being obtained by her’. Thus
MI5 established in 1964, when the text was finally decrypted, that Mrs
Norwood had been an active spy in September 1945, and had been
ordered not to confide in her husband, a Communist school-teacher, about
her espionage. Surprisingly, despite this evidence that she had engaged in
betraying atomic secrets, MI5 chose not to take any action, and did not
even bother to interview her, on the grounds that she had remained a
hardened CPGB member and therefore was unlikely to cooperate with
any interrogation.

No criminal prosecutions resulted in England as a consequence of

Mitrokhin’s disclosures, but in the counter-intelligence world inhabited
by molehunters and surveillance experts there are other, equally
important advantages to be achieved. Most controversially, one such
objective, supervised by John Scarlett, who by then had been expelled
from Moscow, was to publish a historical account of Mitrokhin’s
collection, and this was accomplished in September 1999 with the help of
the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew. Their joint effort, entitled
The Sword and the Shield in the United States, was released amid

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international publicity, with much of the attention focusing on two spies
particular. One was the elderly Melita Norwood, by then a grandmother
living in a London suburb, and the other was SCOT, a former Scotland
Yard detective, John Symonds, described as ‘the most remarkable British
agent identified by Mitrokhin outside the field of S & T’. Symonds may
not have had a talent for science and technology, but he possessed other
skills that he had made available to the KGB for more than eight years.

The drama behind the exposure of these two masterspies is itself

worthy of an entire study in itself, and MI5’s complacency was to be the
source of considerable criticism when Mitrokhin’s material was made
public, but MI5 had not discovered until June 1999 that a BBC journalist,
David Rose, had been researching an unrelated television documentary
entitled The Spying Game in which he intended to include an interview
with Mrs Norwood. He filmed this secretly in August when he had called
at her home in Bexleyheath, Kent, although quite how Rose learned that
Melita Norwood had been a spy remains unclear, but the likelihood is that
he was told about the case while he was being briefed for his film. In any
event, with the certainty that Mrs Norwood was to feature In Rose’s
broadcast, the decision was taken at the very last moment to insert her
real name, and that of John Symonds, in the pages of The Mitrokhin
Archive, thereby attracting considerable media coverage when The Times
serialized the book in early September 1999.

The revelation contained in Mitrokhin’s files that John Symonds

had operated as a KGB agent codenamed SCOT proved hugely
embarrassing for the Security Service because the ex-policeman and army
officer had long ago volunteered a confession that had been rejected as
being too fanciful to be true. Having disappeared when charged with

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corruption in 1972, Symonds had spent the next few years working for
the KGB, and when he finally returned to Britain in April 1980, having
travelled across the world on various different passports, he surrendered
to the authorities and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, having
been found guilty at the Old Bailey on two charges of corruption.
Although Symonds had offered MI5 a potentially vital counter-
intelligence breakthrough, detailing many of the operations he had
participated in under the KGB’s direction, he had been rebuffed because
his story was considered too incredible to be believed. It was only after
his release from Ford open prison, and Mitrokhin’s defection, that MI5
realised what an opportunity it had passed up. Far from being a dreamer
and hoaxer, Symonds had been entrusted with a series of sensitive
operations by his KGB controllers, and was considered in Moscow to
have performed his tasks well.

Even after Mitrokhin’s confirmation of Symonds’ covert role as a

KGB spy, the Security Service could not bring itself to accept his
renewed, generous offer of cooperation, so doubtless the pages that
follow will be read with as much interest by the molehunters of Thames
House as by other readers. What led Symonds to collaborate with the
KGB in the Moroccan capital of Rabat? How many western secretaries
with access to classified information did he seduce while entrapping the
unwary at Bulgarian beach resorts? What is the truth behind his
allegations of corruption in the Metropolitan Police? Who were his
targets among the unmarried women working at the British Embassy in
Moscow? Why did his German girlfriend agree to betray secrets to the
KGB? Did he really recommend that a Special Branch bodyguard
responsible for protecting the KGB defector Oleg Lyalin could be bribed?

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 What follows is a story that no novelist or thriller-writer could have
invented. It is the career of a disappointed soldier, an idealistic police
officer, a desperate fugitive and manipulative spy. It is also the story of
Nellie Genkova, a beautiful Bulgarian language teacher who remained
loyal to a man she knew as John Arthur Phillips, supposedly a
Communist Party official who spent much of the year travelling the
world. Incredible, certainly, but also absolutely true.

Nigel West
August 2010

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 Chapter I
Encounter in Morocco

My first encounter with the KGB required a detailed account of my

background, and I took several days to prepare a document that set out
my career thus far. It began with my birth in Peterborough in 1935, and
ended with my hasty exit from London in 1972. In between were the
events that had shaped my two unexpectedly short experiences as a police
officer.

I was educated at Rougemont, a private prep school in Newport,

south Wales, and then went to St Julian’s, a good grammar school where
I took I joined the Boy Scouts and took an interest in the church. As
someone who was later to be accused of being a professional perjurer,
this may seem odd, but my scout troop met in the church hall and I had
contemplated taking holy orders. I had started and edited our troop
magazine, Contact, and had badgered the local mayor and the bishop into
contributing articles. When the wartime air aces ‘Cats Eyes’ Cunningham
and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire had visited our church I had
persuaded them to submit to interviews, and when I sent them courtesy
copies of the published version I was invited to attend a Christian summer
camp. This consisted of plenty of bible classes and prayer meetings, and
brought me into contact with the children of many senior churchmen.
Eventually my preoccupation petered out, but the enthusiasm I showed
for religion was typical of the way I threw myself into particular interests.

I also excelled rugby, boxing and water polo, but these were
physical achievements, not signs of any academic accomplishments, so I

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did not complete the sixth form before I joined the army at the age of
seventeen for the Officer Training Corps. This was a career choice
encouraged by my father, then still a serving officer based at the Royal
College of Military Science, despite lost a part of his left hand in an
explosion at the Woolwich Arsenal during the Second World War while
conducting secret experimental proof work. He always had good
connections, and one of my godfathers was his former commanding
officer, later to sponsor my application for a commission to the War
Office Selection Board, while another was a senior Special Branch
officer, Commander Flood, who was to give me sound advice about how
to get on in the Met. My father had met Flood when the latter had been
sent to investigate a mysterious explosion in 1940 which was suspected to
have been an act of sabotage by Nazi spies. Flood concluded the incident
had been an accidental detonation, and the two men had remained in
touch with each other after the war, when he had been based at Fort
Halstead.

I was posted to the British Army of the Rhine at Munster, to join

my Royal Artillery regiment, as a private soldier, on being commissioned
in 1953 and came to command Y (Survey) Troop, 94th Locating
Regiment. Although I had volunteered for combat in Korea, I was sent on
an Officer’s Gunnery Course at Larkhill in Wiltshire, where I acquired
some knowledge of 25-pounders and counter-bombardment skills.

Apart from my encyclopaedic grasp of field artillery, my other

lasting asset from the army was an invitation in 1956 to join the army
lodge of the Freemasons. I was assured that being ‘on the square’ would
help my career, and it certainly did me no harm when I later joined the
police and found that the local lodge played an important part in gaining

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promotions. I knew the lodge exercised great influence in the military
because, shortly before leaving the army I recommended that my
younger, middle brother Leonard, then a lowly REME corporal, should
join. Promotion to Quarter-Master followed soon afterwards, and he later
received a commission and was transferred to Middle Wallop where he
spent much of his career developing computer systems and avionics for
helicopters of the Army Air Corps. He was to become master of his
lodge, eloquent proof of the influence exercised by the Brethren.

After nearly three years in the army I was persuaded to join the
Metropolitan Police in what would now be described as a fast-track with
the promise of swift promotion to the rank of inspector, the objective
being the creation of an officer corps within the force, a concept that had
been abandoned before the war, following Lord Trenchard’s reforms
which had created the training school at Hendon. There were about two
dozen of us, all from a similar background, who had been approached to
help transform the Met into a professional organisation based on military
lines, and I recall particularly an ex-Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm pilot, and
another army officer, who held views similar to mine. Within a year we
had all left the police in disgust, most appalled by the standards of
discipline and the pervasive culture of mild corruption. My first
encounter with the Met’s hidden management occurred when Hendon’s
Commandant invited me to a meeting which was attended exclusively by
Freemans. As well as the Commandant, who was later to be appointed
Chief of the City of London force, there were some elderly members of
the permanent staff, and a group of the cadets. It was here that I learned
of the flying start enjoyed by those of us ‘on the square’ who would be
joining one of the many police lodges. We would have advance access to
exam papers, the names of contacts to help with interviews and numerous

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other advantages. No wonder so many inappropriate accelerated
promotions occur in the police, and no wonder there is such resentment
among those who have seen how the Brethren help each other.

Another good example was my arrest while on the ‘Queer Patrol’

in the Covent Garden urinals, of Tom Driberg, the Labour MP whom I
had caught engaged in buggery with another man. A notorious, predatory
homosexual, I marched him off to Bow Street, having angrily rejected his
offer of £5 to forget the matter, but soon afterwards he had telephoned
another Labour MP, and future prime minister, who arrived at the police
station and demanded to see Chief Superintendent ‘Bones’ Jones who
lived in quarters directly over the station. Obviously this was not a total
surprise to some officers, and all involved seemed confident of the
procedure. Soon afterwards both MPs left the building in high spirits, my
pocketbook was confiscated and I had been warned that the incident
never occurred. A month later, still furious at how I had been humiliated
by someone I had learned was a notorious, repeat, offender, I handed in
my warrant card. In the years that followed I watched as Driberg
manoeuvred, or maybe blackmailed, his way to the top of British politics,
was elected chairman of the Labour Party, and was ennobled as Baron
Bradwell of Bradwell juxta Mare shortly before his death in 1976. This
was my first bad experience in the Met, and it was to prove a lasting one.
It reflected not only on Driberg, not only on the willingness of another
MP to conspire with him, but the Met’s institutionalised collusion.
Curiously, if there was a victim of this all-too-frequent encounter in a
public convenience, I felt it had been me.

Many of the other ex-officers opted for police service overseas

with Commonwealth forces, and I also went for an interview at the

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Colonial Office, but although I passed the scrutiny with flying colours, I
failed the medical because of an injury to my legs I had sustained while in
the army. With that avenue closed to me I accepted a post in the City,
working for Rickards, an import-export company in Watling Street.

My experience of the City of London was almost as disappointing

as mine in the police. Whereas small backhanders and bribes were the
norm in the Met, with sergeants accepting £5 notes to look the other way
when a minor charge was dropped, I soon learned that my managing
director routinely inflated invoices and issued false receipts in much the
same way that the company buyer demanded £500 to place a large
purchase. Despite this disagreeable atmosphere I survived for a year, but
when the promised company car failed to materialise I jumped ship, and
joined another venture, Lamson Paragon Business Systems, which more
suited my limited business talents.

LPBS was a pioneer in the new field of electronic automation and

computerisation, and I was selected to spend a year mastering this new
management tool that promised to transform the way business was
conducted. Some of my training was undertaken abroad, and my
specialist area of expertise turned out to be retail entertainment, and soon
I was cultivating my designated territory, the owners of West End night
clubs, in the hope of persuading them to invest in electronic systems that
would enable them to exercise greater control in a trade notorious for
‘stock shrinkage’ and the mishandling of cash. I undertook surveys of the
needs of the prospective clients, designed a suitable system for them and
then supervised its installation. My task at LPBS was to promote the use
of automated tills and other equipment that allowed them to keep track of
where their money was going and monitor the performance of their

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managers and transactions, and in doing so I found myself working
mainly in the evenings and at night. However, at the weekends I usually
stayed with my parents in Hampshire, and it was on one of these
occasions that I met June Price, a nursing sister working at the nearby
Farnborough Hospital. After a long courtship I found myself under
pressure from my father to marry her as our first child, Nicholas, was on
the way. Over the following three years that our marriage survived Lisette
and Joanna followed quickly. June’s family were landowners in
Shropshire, with a large estate outside Shrewsbury, so there was plenty of
support for June when we decided to part, perhaps victims of a City of
London life that really suited neither of us, or maybe because I was the
wrong husband. It was only after we had married that I had discovered
she had been engaged previously to no less than three doctors at the
hospital, and had something of a reputation for wanting to find a husband.

Inevitably, as a young man with a flat in Hampstead and instant

access to London’s most popular nightspots where I could expect plenty
of hospitality and entertainment, I was to discover much about the
seamier side of Soho, including the fact that almost all my clients had
developed a corrupt relationship with the Clubs Office, the C Division
uniformed branch unit at West End Central Police Station in Saville Row,
responsible for licensing the many private clubs in the area. Quite simply,
the clubs needed to operate without police interference, and the best way
to guarantee cooperation was to pay off the police in much the same way
that some of the East End gangs extorted protection money from the pubs
and snooker halls. Regular weekly payments to the appointed bagman
ensured no late night raids, no harassment of customers and no official
objections when the liquor license was renewed by the City of
Westminster magistrates in Marlborough Street. It was during this period,

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while I was courting my future wife, that I became friendly with Gilbert
Kelland, the head of the Clubs Office, who was later to be appointed
Assistant Commissioner, Crime (ACC), and established his reputation by
investigating and arresting the Scotland Yard detectives who had
developed a relationship with a criminal named Naccacio and some of
Soho’s most notorious pornographers. I also came to know the Club
Office bagman, a young detective sergeant, John Smith, who much later
was to be promoted Deputy Commissioner and receive knighthood.

Perhaps surprisingly, in view of what I had learned in the West

End, I decided in 1959 to rejoin the police, whose minor corruption
seemed tame compared to what I had witnessed among businessmen and
traders in the City. I needed a regular income and as a newly married
husband and an expectant father the Met offered security, and I found
myself posted to P Division in Beckenham where I was assigned a
pleasant police flat overlooking the golf course. Soon I was accepted by
the CID and was offered a transfer to the Special Branch at the Yard and
to royal protection duties, but I preferred honest coppering in the suburbs.
Later I was posted to Z Division in Croydon, and then to M Division in
Camberwell with a promotion to the rank of detective sergeant. By now I
was a single, disciplined, effective plain-clothes man with a reputation of
getting results. I had also passed my sergeant’s exam without any
artificial assistance, although I knew that it was perfectly possible,
especially if you were ‘on the square’, of sailing through the papers if you
had the right contacts. The Met set only two promotion exams, and the
papers for both could be obtained in advance through friends or the lodge,
and this state of affairs had been in existence for years. It was part of the
culture, and the justification was that some people worked so hard they
needed some help, and that no harm was done because there was a merit

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element in the competitive nature of the results. Only the top examinees
achieved their promotions, but it did no harm to have influential sponsors.
In my case I had the benefit of advice from Commander Flood, who had
explained how every ambitious police officer needed a career strategy
and good contacts. I had been adopted by a mentor, Sam Goddard, who
had been a detective superintendent at Catford and, I suspected, wanted to
match me up with his daughter, then a law student. He had been part of
Lord Trenchard’s ill-fated, fast-track scheme to introduce an officer corps
into the Met, and when his grade had been abolished he had languished in
his rank for many years, which had given him a particular perspective on
the police greasy pole. He was the first of many to warn me that while
there were plenty of colleagues willing to back you while you were
perceived to be on the way up, the very same people would stab you in
the back if they thought you had become a loser. He was a wise man.
Always old school, Goddard had urged me to cultivate potentially useful
contacts, keeping in touch with anyone who might later become a source,
and I possessed plenty of those through my experience in the City. I
renewed friendships I had made at Bow Street, and re-established contact
with some of the club and casino operators I had met while working for
Lampson Paragon. Everyone knows that it is ‘not what you know, but
who you know’ and, as the lawyers say, ‘you do not have to read every
book, you only have to know where to look’.

While working in Camberwell I gained a reasonable reputation as

an active thief-taker, and I was awaiting a further posting, to C8, the
Flying Squad at New Scotland Yard when, on Saturday 29 November
1969 The Times printed a front-page article by Gary Lloyd and Julian
D’Arcy Mounter, and an editorial written by the editor, William Rees-
Mogg, headlined ‘London Policemen in Bribe Allegations. Tapes Reveal

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Planted Evidence’ identifying me as one of a group of supposedly corrupt
CID officers who had been entrapped by undercover journalists. The
newspaper asserted that the other detectives had been taking money in
exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence in court,
and for ‘allowing a criminal to work unhindered’. I was identified by
name as having admitted on tape to having accepted £150 from a
criminal, who was protected by the pseudonym ‘Michael Smith’ and two
Yard officers, DI Bernard Robson and Gordon Harris, were said to have
received more than £400 in one month from the same man. This one
newspaper story, about which I had received no warning, was to
influence the rest of my life. Overnight, my life as an ambitious CID
officer who was going places, was lost forever, and I would be marked
out as a man who had brought shame and embarrassment to an elite force.
My world simply crumbled, and instead of making decisions and taking
the initiative, I was to go onto the defensive, almost permanently.

I had spent years dealing with the underworld, nicking professional

criminals and making good arrests, but overnight I had been accused,
judged and condemned. I had been a rising star in an organisation that,
thanks to numerous television series, enjoyed one of the best public
relations images in the world, but now everything had been turned
upside-down. I had made hundreds of good arrests, my evidence had
helped convict many criminals and I had received several
commendations, but all this had been achieved courtesy of the corrupt
firm running London’s CID. To some, the more positive my
achievements, the worse their implications.

If the background to The Times’ story was even remotely true, it

was obvious the evidence to back the allegations had been obtained

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illegally, and would have been rejected in any CID office which doubtless
would have used it as a basis for a further investigation. While The Times
may not have been a down-market tabloid, it had no God-given right to
ignore the rules of criminal evidence, and in professional terms this was
an unprecedented, very public execution.

The result of this bombshell was my immediate suspension from

duty while Commander Roy Yorke ordered an enquiry to be conducted
by Detective Chief Superintendent Freddie Lambert. Upon reflection,
having recovered from the initial shock, I thought I had little to fear from
Lambert’s investigation, but as he was preparing his final report in May
1970, which I had learned was set to clear me of all the allegations, he
was taken off the case by Yorke’s replacement, Wallace Virgo. This was
a devastating blow as I had absolutely no confidence in Virgo, who was
himself later convicted of corruption, and not much more in his close
associates the two Ernies, Bond and Millen, and his reputation within the
Met was that he had developed too close a relationship with Lord
Thomson, the Canadian-born proprietor of The Times. This
extraordinarily improbable friendship had started when Virgo had been
appointed to investigate the Belfast Telegraph scandal, a case in which
Roy Thomson, who had inherited a barony from his father in 1951, had
been accused of using improper methods to gain control of Northern
Ireland’s principal regional newspaper. Virgo had begun by calling for a
copy of Thomson’s RCMP file from Canada, and using that background
as justification for a telephone intercept warrant which enabled the lines
at his home in Kensington Palace Gardens and his business in Long Acre
to be recorded by ‘Tinkerbell’, the Yard’s secret intercept facility in
Ebury Bridge Road. Then, as now, such taps cannot be used as evidence
in any criminal trial, but the leads they offer can prove invaluable, and

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this was what had happened with Thomson who had built his expanding
business empire by taking control of investment trusts through offers of
future lucrative directorships to compliant trustees. This had been his
ruthless methodology in Canada where rumours were rife of his
approaches to influential shareholders so he could take over nearly fifty
provincial newspapers. The precise details of what happened over the
Belfast Telegraph, which was owned by a trust where the beneficiary was
rumoured to be a five year-old child, are locked away in the High Court
where there had been furious litigation in the Court of Protection, but in
the end Virgo had cleared Thomson of any misconduct, who had gone on
to take control of The Times, then a failing but prestigious title in
financial trouble. With Wally Virgo in charge of the decision to accept or
reject the claims of a pair of young Times journalists, both still in their
twenties, who had only been on the paper for four years, I knew the likely
outcome, and my worst fears were realised.

In the West End it was clearly understood that Commander Virgo

had carved up the vice scene and licensed all three major players, Bernie
Silver, James Humphreys and Jeff Phillips. All had led long criminal
careers, but counted senior police officers among their closest friends,
dining with them regularly, attending the same Lodge meetings and even
going on holiday together. Humphreys’ own criminal record dated back
to the end of the war when, aged fifteen, he was convicted of house-
breaking and theft of a car, and sent to an Approved School. Since then
he had served two prison sentences, for receiving and for theft, and in
March 1958 had been described by a judge as ‘a hardened and dangerous
criminal’. Upon his release from Dartmoor he had opened his first club,
in Old Compton Street, and asserted that he had started to pay off his
local CID officer, DS Harry Challoner, who was later to be tried for

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planting bricks on demonstrators protesting against a visit to London in
July1963 by King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, and be declared
insane.

By chance I had myself encountered Harry Challoner, because the

mental hospital to which he had been sent was Cane Hill, a large
establishment on our manor. We were under instructions to drop in on
him from time to time to see he was all right, but I never thought there
was anything wrong with him. Known as ‘Tanky’, Challenor had served
with the Commandos and the SAS during the war, and had been
decorated with the Military Medal while operating far behind enemy lines
in Nazi-occupied France. At his trial at the Old Bailey in June 1964 the
jury had taken less than a minute to declare that he was unfit to plead, but
found three other young detectives guilty of perverting the course of
justice. Two received four years, and the youngest received three years,
but Challenor spent just two years at the Netherne Hospital, in Surrey,
and Leavesden. Upon his release he went on a tour of the battlefields in
Italy where he had fought during the war, found a job with a firm of
solicitors in Norbury and in 1990 wrote his memoirs. According to the
Masonic gossip in the Met, Challonor had been given the benefit of
advice from Edward Clarke QC, a future Old Bailey judge and leading
member of the Sir Edward Clarke Lodge, to which Challenor happened to
belong. Whenever Clarke defended police officers, it was noticeable that
their pocketbooks always went missing and were unavailable for
inspection, which is precisely what happened to Challenor and his
subordinates.

The point about Challenor was that he represented my most

prolonged contact with a supposedly corrupt officer, and he had achieved

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considerable notoriety because his case was the first real proof of a
problem within the CID, or at least within West End Central.

Challenor had been in a different league to Virgo and his

immediate subordinate Bill Moody, and his offence, of planting evidence
on a demonstrator, was quite different to taking money off criminals like
Humphreys, but I knew that the Met had found a breakdown through
overwork a convenient explanation for the lack of any forensic evidence
in the suspect’s clothes to support Challoner’s claim that he had found a
brick in his pocket. In the aftermath of the demonstrator’s acquittal at
Bow Street, on a complete lack of any forensic evidence to show any
brick had been anywhere near the defendant’s clothing, Challenor was
prosecuted, and an enquiry had been set up by the Home Secretary ,
conducted by Arthur Evan James QC, at which several of the detective’s
earlier arrests had proclaimed their innocence, but in fact only five
convictions were quashed as unsafe, and all allegations of assault and
taking bribes were rejected.

Challenor’s conviction was a milestone and served to undermine

public confidence in the police. It also confirmed rumours, that had
circulated for years, that the Met did not quite live up to its reputation.
Fortunately Challenor was an eccentric, colourful figure who could easily
be portrayed as a war hero who had succumbed to the strain of massive
overwork, and had suffered a breakdown. In other words, Challenor had
been a one-off, and no wider conclusions could be drawn for an
unfortunate lapse. Some of us suspected there was rather more to what
had been happening in Soho, the patch covered by West End Central in
Savile Row.

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 Humphreys and his wife Rusty ran the strip clubs in Soho while his
rival, Bernie Silver, organised the prostitutes and maintained a string of
dirty book shops, and Phillips distributed blue movies. Bill Moody had
joined the OPS in 1965, and when he had been appointed its head in
February 1969 he had institutionalised the arrangement and extorted
protection money from all the key players. Regular, weekly retainers
were paid, together with an annual Christmas bonus and a lump sum of
£1,000 for each new site opened. Managers that made their contributions
were never raided; those that fell behind in their payments had their stock
confiscated, which was then ‘recycled’ back into the trade. Humphreys,
Phillips and Silver were not only free to expand their vice empires, but
were even considered suitable guests for the Flying Squad’s annual
dinner, as was another colourful character known as ‘Ron the dustbin’.

The allegations of corruption published by The Times could be

traced back to Eddie Brennan, a retired safe-cracker who had graduated
into fencing stolen property. Brennan was a highly successful criminal
who had the advantage of a partnership with a corrupt locksmith who
supplied him with duplicate keys to dozens of commercial premises.
Brennan chose the targets and then allocated them to one of several
London gangs, leaving the professionals to undertake the robberies in
return for the privilege of buying the proceeds at remarkably low prices,
thus allowing him a very substantial margin. As Brennan’s fame spread,
the Yard heard that he was personally responsible for a veritable crime
wave that had swept the capital, and in November 1967 a special
operation, code-named COATHANGER was prepared by a team of
detectives led by Chief Inspector Irvine of No. 6 Regional Crime Squad.
The codename COATHANGER was chosen because much of the crime
under investigation concerned stolen clothing, and Detective Inspector

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Bernie Robson from the Yard’s C9 Department took over operational
command in October 1969 when the gangs resumed their activities. Of
the eleven detectives working on COATHANGER, only two were from
the Met, and the rest had been drawn from provincial forces. Robson
personally had arrested twenty-two of the robbers, including the
technician responsible for making the duplicate keys, but some of these
had been copied and circulated, allowing several other gangs to
participate in the raids. In fact, so many keys were being passed around
that it was rumoured different gangs had turned up at the same premises
to rob them at the same time! On one occasion a gang had arrived just as
another was coming out, having left nothing worth stealing.

Robson’s first task was to recruit an informant and his chosen

target was a professional named Michael Perry, a twenty-two year-old car
dealer with eighteen convictions. Perry lived in Nunhead Lane, Peckham
and was generally known to be at the very heart of the ‘skeleton key
gang’, and when the two men met early in October 1969 Perry had been
found in possession of a case of stolen whisky, and had been charged
with dishonestly handling. Under pressure, he had admitted knowing the
names of ten members of the gang, and five receivers. He was Robson’s
best chance of bringing COATHANGER to a successful conclusion, but
five days later he was talking to The Times.

CID officers have many ways of cultivating informants but when

time is a luxury there are methods of cutting corners and applying
pressure. Sometime called recruitment by ‘the hard way’, the objective is
to coerce cooperation through old-fashioned intimidation. In Perry’s case
he fell for an old expedient, and he was simply tricked into touching some
gelignite which was immediately sealed into an evidence exhibit bag,

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thus leaving him open to the charge that his fingerprints had been found
on a piece of explosive recovered from a crime scene. Once the
fingerprint identification had been confirmed, and usually accepted by
juries as irrefutable scientific evidence from a forensics expert, the target
would be facing a long prison sentence unless he agreed to become a CID
‘snout’. In Perry’s case, he was threatened with eight years inside unless
he identified London’s master fence and his key-man, and he confided his
predicament to Brennan who offered the story to The Tmes. However, the
version peddled by Brennan omitted the true background to
COATHANGER and centred on the allegation that a young man had
been the victim of a scheme run by two Yard detectives who had planted
evidence on him and then threatened to charge him with possession
unless they were paid a large sum of cash. This rather sanitised tale of
extortion was accepted without question by the newspaper which
assigned two journalists to collaborate with Perry who, under their
direction, began calling local CID officers with the offer of information.

Perry was suspected as the leader of a gang of young criminals

known, after the television series, as ‘the likely lads’ who exploited a
contact in a locksmith business. They would drive up to the midlands,
visit sometimes several clothing stores in one evening, and empty them,
using duplicate keys and wearing white coats to allay suspicion and avoid
leaving forensic evidence. Over the past two years they had raided more
than a hundred shops, had left no clues, and had stolen more than a
million pounds of property. They never forced an entry, and the single
common denominator to their crime spree was the complete absence of
any usable forensic evidence such as fingerprints, hair or fibres.
However, we had heard from informants of Perry’s involvement, but had
not been able to prove anything because the likely lads, shrewdly, had

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been working off our patch. We knew they were all driving around in big
cars with pockets full of cash, but we had not spotted them in an actual
robbery. We kept them under observation for weeks, and when we had
identified most of the gang members we sent a report to the Yard which
circulated their details to some of the forces in the midlands that had been
plagued by the well-planned and executed raids. For our part, we
continued the surveillance in the hope of catching them at home after one
of their escapades.

The catalyst was a robbery on 22 September 1969 at the Nuneaton

& Atherstone Co-op Society in which a large consignment of cigarettes
were stolen, and two days later the Warwickshire detectives descended on
Peckham to arrest Perry, and we received a request for assistance which
implied that they thought these hardened young south London career
criminals would crack at the first sight of a search warrant and an
interrogation. The midlands officers wanted our cooperation in arresting
all the suspects simultaneously, but the DI at Peckham knew that such
tactics would waste six weeks of our time. His solution was to send the
visitors to Camberwell with the suggestion that they apply for a search
warrant from a local Justice of the Peace who was always willing to sign
anything we put in front of him, irrespective of the supporting evidence.
As I was later to discover, this particular exercise had proved very
profitable for the detectives involved, as the raid resulted in the recovery
of a large quantity of cigarettes, only a proportion of which ended up in
the property store as evidence. Such diversions were quite routine, but
this rather minor episode was to come back to haunt all concerned.

In spite of the successful raid, the visitors really had no evidence

against the likely lads, only a strong suspicion, but we were to humour

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them. Even the Yard, which had put the likely lads under surveillance in
the hope of catching them unloading their gear at their receivers, had
failed in their task, but all this promised to change when we received a
call from Perry offering information.

My first encounter with Perry occurred following his call to our

office. Although we had not met previously, I had known his mother, a
convicted shoplifter from Woolwich and it was through this link that he
picked me as a suitable target. Always willing to recruit a new source,
and being under no pressure to achieve any particular results because I
was unconnected with the Yard’s COATHANGER operation, I met Perry
and made the standard ‘soft’ pitch, that his cooperation with me would
result in a measure of protection for him should he come to the attention
of the police. This was an old technique, much favoured by my mentor,
Ken Drury who was later to command the Flying Squad, and had built a
solid reputation while a DI on the Regional Crime Squad I had served on
at St Mary Cray, Orpington. Perry seemed agreeable to the suggestion,
but when I called for his file I learned that he had plenty of form, and was
even suspected of having broken into the tobacconists directly underneath
his own flat, which he shared with a man named Robert Laming. Both
men were also under investigation concerning a missing schoolgirl who
was found to be living with them. In short, they were really nasty villains,
and at a later meeting I was concerned that his reason for calling me to a
rendezvous was his claim to me that two detectives had planted evidence
on him, and he had named Robson and Harris. I had passed this awkward
news on to DI Jim Sylvester at Peckham, whom I knew had served with
Robson at Chelsea, and would be able to warn them. Six weeks after my
meeting with Perry The Times ran their scoop that DI Robson, his

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assistant ‘Bomber’ Harris and myself, had been meeting Perry regularly
to extort small sums of money from him.

The evidence supporting the allegations, which was delivered to

New Scotland Yard at 10pm on the night prior to publication, consisted
of a long witness statement from Perry and a tape recording, and this was
enough for the C1 Night Duty Officer, Ken Brett, to telephone the
Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Peter Brodie at home. He ordered
Commander Yorke to start an immediate, overnight investigation to be
conducted by Fred Lambert, and his assistant, Sergeant Basil ‘Baz’
Haddrell whom I had known as a fellow officer at St Mary Cray, ready
for a top-level meeting early on Saturday morning. Lambert had been on
call that evening, but was in a potentially awkward position because he
had served with Harris at Brixton and later had worked together on the
Flying Squad, and had got to know his family. I later learned that
Lambert informed Yorke that he had also served with Robson, but Yorke
had merely replied that he had also known both Robson and Harris.
Lambert was ‘to get on with it and do a good job’, but he was unhappy
with his assignment, which was to last six months.

Within an hour of these events I was telephoned at home to let me

know what had happened, and as I had worked on several disciplinary
enquiries I knew the precautions that had to be taken. I had played a very
peripheral role in the Richardson ‘Torture Gang’ case, which had put
away London’s most dangerous gangsters since the Kray brothers, and
that enquiry had led to ninety allegations of corruption against the
officers who had built the prosecution’s case. I had not been one of the
team that had investigated Richardson’s lucrative rackets, which
including running the car parks at London Airport, but coincidentally I

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had known Eddie Richardson years earlier when we had both spent
Saturday nights at dances held at the Streatham ice rink. Like hundreds of
other CID officers, I had taken a few witness statements and followed up
some local enquiries concerning the Richardson enquiry, but truly my
contribution had been negligible.

Almost immediately after my initial warning I received a call from

a Daily Express journalist who read me an extract from the first edition of
the next morning’s Times, and I had to suppress a gasp and pretend this
was all in a day’s work, while declining to comment. The headline alone
made my heart race: ‘LONDON POLICEMEN IN BRIBE
ALLEGATIONS. TAPES REVEAL PLANTED EVIDENCE’.

Disturbing evidence of bribery and corruption among certain

London detectives was handed by The Times to Scotland Yard last
night. We have, we believe, proved that at least three detectives are
taking large sums of money in exchange for dropping charges, for
being lenient with evidence offered in court. And for allowing a
criminal to work unhindered. Our investigations into these men
convince us that their cases are not isolated. The total haul of this
detective Sergeant John Symonds of Camberwell, and two others,
Detective Inspector Bernard Robson of Scotland Yard’s C(
Division and Detective Sergeant Gordon Harris, a Regional Crime
Squad officer on detachment from Brighton to Scotland Yard, was
more than £400 in the past month from one man alone.

I told the Express journalist I had no comment to make, and quickly

jumped in my car to pick a copy of the first edition from an all-night
newspaper stand in Fleet Street. I skimmed through several paragraphs

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about Robson and Harris until I reached what were claimed to be extracts
of conversations between me and a small-time professional criminal
whom I had supposedly met in south London pub car parks. These
meetings had been photographed and tape-recorded, and apparently I had
advised him: “Don’t forget always to let me know straight away if you
need anything because I know people everywhere, because I am in a little
firm in a firm, alright?”
In the cold light of day, and taken out of context, the conversation,
mixed with every kind of expletive, sounded ghastly, but that is the way
you talked to such people. Furthermore, if you were an energetic thief-
taker, you would have to endure allegations of that kind as an
occupational hazard. That, of course, did not mean that such claims were
not investigated to the fullest possible extent, so first I contacted my
family solicitor to alert him, and then I searched my own house from top
to bottom for any incriminating evidence, such as chemically
impregnated banknotes that might have been planted on me, before
driving to my office at Camberwell to check my desk. Accompanied by
the station sergeant I also went through the prisoners’ property store and
examined all the valuables in the safe to make certain that everything
logged under my name was properly accounted for. I had heard of so
many examples of officers being ‘fitted up’ with compromising evidence
that I wanted to be absolutely certain that I was not about to fall into the
same trap. My final precaution was to take the key from behind my desk
and visit a small locked broom cupboard in an outbuilding that was
marked ‘cleaners’ but contained the CID’s secret cache of fit-up exhibits.
This was a collection of knives, guns, drugs and masks that were
occasionally deployed when a reluctant informant needed some
persuasion. In my experience they were the essential tools of the CID
officer’s trade, but their discovery during an official investigation would

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cause nothing but trouble so I carried the lot to my car and drove them to
Peckham police station where a colleague willingly accepted them.
Finally I took my car to a late night garage and put it on the ramp to
examine the underside of the vehicle. Once again, this was a necessary
precaution because I had heard of small, magnetised containers packed
with banknotes being concealed beneath the engine block. Only when I
had completed the most detailed search inside and outside the car did I
feel entirely confident about facing Lambert’s investigation which
doubtless would begin early the following morning.

It may sound odd that I should have gone to such lengths if I was
truly innocent of taking money from Michael Perry, but I had good
reason to be anxious. I reckoned that no newspaper would publish such
allegations unless there was a verifiable paper-trail, and in this case an
absolutely essential component would have been a stash of dirty money. I
knew that none existed, but it would not take much effort to find a way of
planting some on me, my car, in my desk, or even in my garden shed. By
checking all the obvious hiding places, any subsequent discovery would
have had to have been based on a plant made after the newspaper had hit
the streets, and I would be in the clear.

For a newspaper to behave in this way was, in those days, really

quite extraordinary, and for the upmarket Times to indulge in such tactics
was unprecedented. Why had the newspaper not taken Perry’s allegations
straight to the Commissioner, Sir John Waldron, who was universally
respected? Whatever his loyalty to the force, Waldron would had been
ruthless in his pursuit of corruption. Even more inexplicable was the
newspaper’s willingness to collude with a professional criminal and print
a story which, by its nature, presumed guilt. In these uncharted waters I

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knew that I was in deep trouble. The Met employed 3,250 detectives, but
it was my name in the headlines.

On the next morning I went in to my office as usual and awaited

my fate, but as I read the front page of The Times again, and read
allegations against a total of fifteen colleagues in south London my alarm
grew. I had been lumped together with Robson and Harris, and I found it
extraordinarily reckless that they had apparently continued to meet Perry
after I had warned them. However, one call to DI Sylvester at Peckham
established that he had not said anything to Robson, but had conveyed a
message to Harris, who later denied he had ever received it. Suddenly
Ken Drury’s famous ‘soft’ recruitment pitch looked rather less impressive
as it appeared in transcript form in the newspaper’s impassive print, and I
realised I would be bound to be tied in with Robson and Harris. As I
waited for the inevitable I carefully went through my paperwork,
comparing the entries in the CID duty book with my own diary and
pocketbook and, after attending a prearranged meeting with another
informant unconnected with COATHANGER, finally went home and
called in sick to give me some extra time to consider my increasingly
precarious position.

By the following morning the situation had changed markedly, and

Victor Lissack arrived early, having been despatched from the Yard, with
a request that I issue libel proceedings in the High Court instantly so as to
prevent any further revelations in The Times. A writ had been drawn up
by a prominent lawyer, the ex-MP Edward Gardiner QC, and this was
served later the same day, just as I learned that there were some major
problems with the Times’ story. To my relief I heard that there was no
reference to any money in the transcript of my conversation with Perry,

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and there was considerable doubt about the ‘continuity of handling’ in
respect of the tapes which had been left around on desks at the The Times,
played at office parties and even taken home by journalists, thereby
mixing up the originals with the copies. Worse, it emerged that the
journalists had given money to Perry to hand to the police, which smelt of
entrapment, but had failed to take the obvious precaution of searching
Perry properly after his meeting to see if he had kept the cash. Combined
with the illegal use of a wireless transmitter to record the detectives’
conversation remotely and the illegal recordings of telephone
conversations from Perry’s mother’s flat, the case seemed to boil down to
the allegations made in Perry’s uncorroborated witness statement.
Certainly he had been equipped with a small Grundig tape-recorder as a
back-up, but he also had the ability to switch it on and off, which he had
done. Furthermore, apart from Peter Jay, the Economics Correspondent,
Brennan had been the only other person involved in the episode,
apparently employed as a consultant, because the newspaper was
unwilling to take any advice from the ex-police officer who worked as
The Times’s chief of security for fear of a leak back to the Yard. In short,
Perry’s evidence looked very dubious and when a check was made with
the Bank of England on the serial numbers of the banknotes allegedly
handed to me in October, it turned out that they had not printed nor
placed in circulation until six weeks later. This was an important point
because The Times journalists insisted they had looked in Perry’s pockets
to establish that he had not kept the £50 himself but, crucially, they had
failed to search his car. I knew I had not taken the notes, so the obvious
answer was that Perry had hidden them somewhere in his car, but they
had not thought to search that too.

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 It was on Lissack’s advice that I made a fateful decision, to
immediately start work on a lengthy statement, what I would later call my
dossier, in which I detailed the kind of practices required for an efficient
CID office to obtain convictions, and named some, but by no means all,
of the detectives who cut corners. This was an exercise in self-
preservation, and my instructions to Lissack was to keep it in his safe and
not show it to anyone unless something happened to me. This was to be
my insurance policy, or so I had thought, but I had put my trust in the
wrong man.

Lambert’s preliminary report on The Times’ allegations was

delivered to the Commissioner on Monday,1 December 1969, and on the
following Thursday the Yard announced that Robson, Harris and myself
were suspended from duty. It seemed that the tapes were far from
conclusive evidence of anything, except perhaps some unwise and
colourful remarks made by me. I was told later that when colleagues had
listened to the tapes they had laughed because over the years they had all
heard the same thing. As I had learned at Ken Drury’s knee, there is a
method to gaining the confidence of a professional criminal, and part of
the technique is to assure him that you are ‘alright’, and that he will be
too if he works with you, to mutual benefit. The crook has to believe that
he can have a little license to do his bits and pieces where he can be
protected, in return for information and bodies. Whether a detective ever
really gives the promised measure of protection is an entirely different
matter, but it is accepted that he is going to try and acquire the protection
without compromising anyone else, while you are intent on gaining the
information without delivering on the rest of the bargain. It is a game that
has gone on for years, and all the tapes showed was the extent to which I
had learned my trade, and the number of times one could insert

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swearwords into a conversation. They were not to be listened to by the
faint-hearted, nor the middle classes over their breakfasts, nor gentlemen
in the clubs in St James’s, but they did reflect life in south London’s
criminal fraternity.

Another potential source of embarrassment was a disparaging

comment about provincial police officers, and I knew such comments
would not endear me to any ‘old swede’ brought in to conduct an
investigation of my case. The Met culturally had always been fairly
contemptuous of country coppers and in one of the taped conversations
with Perry I had gone through the usual routine of building up my own
status as a man of influence within the CID, describing myself as ‘a firm
within a firm’, using the jargon Perry would understand, so he would
know that I was not a person to be manipulated or messed about. I wanted
results from him and plain language was called for, although I erred when
I slipped into an explanation of how I would not be able to exercise any
influence outside the Met. Naturally, such observations, though reflecting
the opinions of colleagues, would be bound to irritate provincial officers.
I suppose it could also be said that the tapes were an embarrassment to
the Yard because, if played at a trial and combined with my explanation,
it would show that the Met routinely conned the criminal classes into
becoming informants. Somehow this was not a message the Yard wanted
to broadcast, or the public wanted to be told. However, even if our
conversation might have been a little strong for some tastes, the tapes
showed nothing that was directly incriminating, and far from betraying
the sound of notes rustling, there was not even a single word recorded
about any money, and definitely no threats. With the pay-off notes
discredited, and doubt cast on the ‘iffy’ tapes, and nothing awkward in
the recording, I really thought I was off the hook, and rightly so.

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 The impending litigation quickly eliminated further stories in The
Times, and the cases against the other twelve suspended officers soon
collapsed, leaving a few relatively minor disciplinary matters, and
Robson, Harris and me to face the music. However, as the Lambert
enquiry progressed, his focus turned on The Times and there was talk of
charges being brought in respect of Perry’s deployment as an agent
provocateur. This was excellent news, but it did not last long as the
Home Secretary, James Callaghan MP, announced that he was to order an
outside force to conduct a further investigation. This brought angry
protests from the Commissioner, Sir John Waldron, who insisted that
Callaghan had no power to interfere with his force which enjoyed
autonomy under the Metropolitan Police Act, and when the ineffectual
Frank Williamson, then HM Inspector of Constabulary (Crime) and
formerly the Chief Constable of Cumbria, was appointed to advise on the
matter, helped by a team drawn from the Midlands, the new enquiry ran
into the sand, unable to interview any officers from the Met. The
conclusion was that Lambert submitted his report, clearing me, and
recommending that I be allowed to return to duty. As for Williamson, he
retired prematurely at the end of December 1971 and never received the
knighthood that is usually granted to HM Inspectors. Within the Met the
view was that Williamson, with his austere Plymouth Brethren
background and crusading zeal, had been entirely the wrong man for the
job. He could see no reason for any police officer to socialise with
criminals, whereas it had long been accepted in the CID that the only way
to catch thieves was to go for an occasional drink with them. It was a
fundamental difference in attitude, and one that broke Williamson, or at
least earned him the contempt of the Met which understood what needed
to be done to fight crime effectively.

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 Before he left Williamson did get a couple of scalps, but the case
were absurdly trivial. Two uniformed constables at Peckham, Paul
Watson and David Lovett, were tried at the Old Bailey for having
claimed to have arrested Michael Perry in September 1969 on suspicion
of having stolen a van. In fact four other officers had made the arrest, but
in those days it was routine in a straightforward case for a nominee to
take the case to court, especially when a guilty plea was likely. However,
in Perry’s case, which went to trial in May 1970, it emerged during cross-
examination that Watson and Lovett had not been the officers who had
taken Perry into custody, so they were themselves arrested. The judge, Mr
Justice Neil McKinnon, gave them a conditional discharge and
recommended the two men, who had excellent records and were
described as ‘absolutely dedicated’ to the job, should be allowed to stay
on the force, but a disciplinary tribunal held a few days later required
them to resign, a sure sign of the new climate in the Met.

This, however, was not the end of the matter, for in May 1970
Lambert was suddenly removed from the enquiry by Virgo, told to take
early retirement on medical grounds and replaced by DCS Alfred ‘Bill’
Moody, whom I had known as a sergeant at Croydon. I would have
described myself as an acquaintance rather than a friend, and the only
social events we met at were connected with boxing, for we were both
‘pugs’, which tended to blur the disparity in our ranks. I had been the
light heavyweight champion of all three services, and Moody had won the
Met’s middleweight title.

Lambert’s sudden removal from the scene had been prompted by a

mysterious, unannounced visit to Tintagel House by the DAC, Dick

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Chitty, where there had been a furious row with Lambert, who had
threatened to throw his senior out of his office. Lambert had been under
incredible strain and had been appointed to the investigation more by
accident than design. His marriage had collapsed and he was personally
very distressed at having to investigate men he knew and liked, so he had
seized the opportunity of a full pension after twenty-four years’ service,
having submitted a claim that he had been handicapped by severe
depression. He went on permanent sick leave in September 1970 and was
out of the force by March the following year. Naturally, I was dismayed
by this development because of what I knew about Moody, who had
exploited his membership of the Freemasons to manoeuvre himself into
the Obscene Publications Squad (OPS), a notorious centre of corruption
at the Yard known as ‘the Dirty Squad’. Often called ‘Punchy’ because of
his renown for suddenly hitting people in the face without warning,
Moody had moved to the OPS as a Detective Inspector through his
membership of the same Freemasonry lodge as the two Ernies, and had
taken two detective constables, Mike Smith and Ernie Culver, with him
from Croydon. At the Yard, the OPS was famed for adding £20 to the
weekly wages of every member of the Squad, with an additional bonus of
up to £100 each Friday, money known as the ‘whack’ which came from
pay-outs made by the very pornographers the OPS was intended to put
out of business. Some of the officers who went to the OPS were corrupt
already, but some people believed that the very nature of the work,
spending hours watching the most appalling, degrading filth, was highly
corrosive. Certainly I had one good friend who worked on the Dirty
Squad and found his home life transformed. Previously strong-minded, he
had been profoundly affected by the material he had been obliged to
handle, and had himself acquired some of the bizarre perversions he had
witnessed, which resulted in his wife, repelled by his behaviour, walking

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out on him. One of the cellars at Scotland Yard had been converted into a
viewing room, almost a private cinema, and here friends of the OPS team
could watch the latest seizures. I had been a very occasional visitor,
drawn by curiosity but acutely aware of the very addictive nature of the
filth which included the most horrifying ‘snuff’ movies, child
pornography and other material treasured by the aficionados.

In theory Moody’s job had been to stamp out pornography, or at

least suppress its distribution and availability so it did not fall into the
path of people who did not want it. In reality he controlled the trade in a
way which enriched himself, his squad and his superiors at the Yard. As a
shareholder with porn merchants like Silver, Mason and Humphreys, he
had a vested interest in eliminating out the non-paying opposition. He
would have argued that that newcomers to the market (in which the
demand was insatiable) often displayed a degree of recklessness that
threatened the entire racket. For instance, some of those trying to
establish themselves sent direct-mail shots to potential customers,
exercises which inevitably led to complaints, and an opportunity for the
OPS to visit a new studio or shop and drive them out of business, unless
of course they could be taken aboard, in return for a percentage of the
takings. Incredibly, huge sums of cash were counted openly on OPS
desks when Moody’s men were dividing up the weekly payments. Such
stories came my way from Ernie Culver who saw these events first-hand,
and may have been responsible for an invitation for me to join the OPS.
This I had turned down because there was a chance I would be asked to
join Ken Drury on the Flying Squad, which was rather more my style.
When word circulated that I had declined the OPS there was widespread
disbelief, for such a posting was usually followed by a new car, then a

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new house, and certainly plenty of smart clothes and expensive Italian
shoes.

For Moody, who had never been on a Special Operations training

course, to be assigned Lambert’s role was very disquieting, and strongly
suggested that there was influence being exerted from a senior level.
There were thirty DCSs at the Yard at that time, and I had drawn the one
I knew to have the most to hide. Although not ostentatiously corrupt, he
owned two sports cars, a Triumph and a Lancia, the latter bought from
another notorious Soho pornographer, George Vinn. When Moody took
over Lambert’s office at Tintagel House he also installed DS Cyril Jones,
who had worked with him in the OPS, and in 1976 was to be sentenced to
seven years’ imprisonment for corruption.

Some might think that if a corrupt officer was appointed to

investigate an allegation of corruption he would be inclined to protect his
own, but on the contrary I knew in my bones that such a person would
deliberately sacrifice some of his own kind in order to divert suspicion
from himself, not unlike the old story of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper.
My gut instinct was not far wrong. One of my close neighbours, with
whom I occasionally shared my dog-walks, was an old friend who had
been assigned to the enquiry, and he told me that he was very, very
worried. This coincided with similar reports I heard from other friends
who had their contacts on the team and had heard that the attitude
towards me was changing.

There was also another reason why I had ever reason to fear
Superintendent Moody, who was later to be convicted of corruption and
sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, for he had a strong but

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undisclosed link to Michael Perry. Some months earlier Perry and Roy
Brooks, a wealthy Peckham street trader, had been identified by an
informant in Nuneaton named Kirtin as having participated in a local
shop-breaking. Kirtin had been a London criminal who had moved to
Nuneaton when he had married a local girl, and when he had been cut out
of his proceeds of the robbery, he had offered the police the names of his
co-conspirators. Based on Kirtin’s information, the Warwickshire police
had gone looking for Brooks and Perry, but when they had failed to find
them, an official request to question them had been passed to DI Jim
Sylvester. He in turn assigned Ian Harley and a young local DC named
Hill to make the arrest, but after they had been arrested Brooks threw
soup over a police officer in the cells and escaped. When I heard about
this incident I could not help chuckling, for Brooks was a well-known
character on the manor and the idea that he could have waltzed out of the
custody area after assaulting a uniformed gaoler was absurd. I never
found out the real story, but doubtless money had changed hands and the
tale of the escape had been circulated as a cover.

Perry, however, was arrested, to be taken to Nuneaton for further

questioning by the Warwickshire detectives. My only connection was that
by chance Ian Harley had asked me to take over the case that very
afternoon because he wanted to go to his daughter’s birthday party.
Unfortunately, when the bumpkins came down to see Perry I learned they
really had no evidence apart from the word of Kirtin, the informant.
Harley was never my partner, and at that time my ‘CID aide’ was a young
Welsh officer, Taffy Holmes, who was, years later, to be appointed
master of his lodge, and commit suicide during the investigation into the
notorious underworld kingpin and murderer Kenneth Noye. I explain this
only to demonstrate that my connection with Harley was far from close,

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and on that particular afternoon I had been doing him a favour by helping
out the men from Warwickshire and seeing them off safely with their
prisoner.

When the Warwickshire police arrived, and they disclosed the

weakness of their case, I explained that their plan to confront Perry in the
cells and extract a confession from him would never work as he was a
hardened criminal. Instead, I suggested the detectives pretend they
possessed much more evidence, perhaps some fingerprints, and behave as
though Perry had been charged. This was a standard tactic in the Met but
seemed quite novel to the bumpkins who had assumed Perry would crack
as soon as they challenged him. I played a small part in this harmless
deception by telling Perry confidentially that he was to be taken up to
Nuneaton because there was strong evidence against him, and I
recommended he plead guilty to a lesser offence under the Theft Act.
Perry listened to the advice and, so it seemed to me, was persuaded that I
was doing him a favour. Of course, the reverse was the truth.

Perry was taken up to Warwickshire where he soon forgot my

advice and denied everything because, as I subsequently learned, he had
been tipped off already by Ian Harley, when he had been brought in to the
police station. As a result, Perry was released and was quickly back in
circulation in Peckham.

During the course of those investigations Brooks produced an alibi

for the time of the robbery by a man described as a pillar of the
community and a Justice of the Peace in Peckham. Actually this seedy
man was a JP and a criminal, Frank Holbert, known as ‘Frankie the
Barber’, who also happened to work on the side for Moody as his

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bagman, collecting contributions from Bernie Silver, the king of West
End pornographers, and his competitor John Mason. Frankie was a classic
intermediary, a part often played by publicans and bookmakers who acted
as middlemen between the police and criminals, trusted by both sides.
Although he had no criminal convictions (which would have disqualified
him from sitting on the bench) he had plenty of contacts and often held
money while a deal was being transacted. Frequently this involved a bribe
ensure a bail application went unopposed, when the criminal would only
authorise Frankie to release his money once the police had kept their side
of the bargain. It was an arrangement that suited all concerned, and was a
daily occurrence throughout London. If some unforeseen event took
place, such as an unhelpful judge intervening, the disappointed party
would be entitled to a refund, and Frankie would simply return the cash,
albeit with his commission deducted. He also acted as a ‘cut-out’, passing
wads of notes from criminals to particular officers, which avoided the
necessity of a detective having to meet someone who might be under
surveillance. There were, of course, plenty of others in the same
‘middling game’, among them ‘Peg-leg’ Birchmore and ‘Red-faced’
Tommy in Southwalk, but in Peckham it was Frankie who was the bridge
between the underworld and the rest. How he was ever appointed to the
bench was a mystery, but doubtless it was another Masonic fix assisted
by bent coppers.

In his role as a police bagman Frankie had also operated in the

West End where he had gathered a good deal of evidence against Moody,
so when the Nuneaton burglary looked like getting serious Wally Virgo
had despatched Moody to conduct the interview with the supposedly
respectable Peckham JP for the Warwick’s police, and then travel to
Nuneaton and speak to the officers involved in the case. This was really

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the turning-point for the investigation because, as Moody must have
realised, Frankie represented the weakest link in the chain, and if he was
questioned by any of Williamson’s men he would be bound to implicate
others. He had given a bogus alibi to Brooks, and he had also signed the
search warrant for the premises where the stolen cigarettes had been
found. A proportion of these, of course, had wound up with the police for
resale, and there were plenty of other matters to worry Moody if Frankie
thought he was in danger of being stripped of his status and maybe even
banged up for perverting the course of justice. He would be bound to say
almost anything to stay out of prison, and the general view at the Yard,
and in my own sergeant’s unit at Camberwell was that he would crack if
Williamson got hold of him.

Accordingly, Moody verified the Brooks alibi and proceeded to

undermine the information from Kirtin who was, after all, only interested
in a reward. In spite of the fact that Moody assaulted one of the Nuneaton
policemen, which was the subject of a complaint to the Met at Chief
Constable level, Moody succeeded in stopping the case against Perry’s
co-conspirator, and the case was dropped. Not surprisingly, I had strong
reservations about the wisdom of allowing either Virgo or Moody’s OPS
men anywhere near any case that involved Perry, although I was
encouraged when I was passed a message through Mike Smith, whom I
had known at Croydon, offering ‘fraternal greetings’ and the news that
Lambert had been removed because a decision had been taken that the
Times staff should be ‘dropped out’, and Lambert had been unwilling to
take the hint. The canteen gossip was that Lord Thomson’s first
experiment with high-profile journalism, intended to attract new readers
to a title with falling circulation figures and a reputation for dull
reporting, had proved a disaster and the newspaper simply could not

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afford to lose a potentially hideously expensive libel action, nor be seen
to withdraw the allegations of corruption at the heart of the Met.

Moody’s supposedly changed attitude was a strange development

and I talked it over with Robson at a lunch at his club, the Royal
Automobile Club, in Pall Mall. On this occasion we simply met for drinks
and then sat down to lunch, but the RAC had a certain reputation at the
Yard, where senior officers were known to like the swimming pool and
steam bath. It was just a short stroll across Green Park, and men dressed
only in a towel have little opportunity to conceal a listening device. It was
an ideal venue for holding sensitive discussions, but my conversation
with Robson required no such precautions.

Robson had served in the Royal Navy during the war, had
commanded a Motor Torpedo Boat, and was an experienced Regional
Crime Squad officer, but he was worried by leaks he had heard from
inside Moody’s enquiry. There was talk that the Times staff had all been
re-interviewed by his men, rumours of pressure from Callaghan, who for
years had been the Police Federation’s influential Parliamentary adviser,
to help his son-in-law Peter Jay, and even speculation that some new
evidence had been found concerning Robson, supposedly from a
colleague who had been put under pressure to make allegations against
him. Only later was he to discover that it was his trusted partner,
‘Bomber’ Harris, who had been persuaded to turn against him and make a
highly incriminating witness statement.

The problem with such news was that we were all vulnerable to
allegations of minor corruption which to a degree was endemic across
London, and certainly not restricted to the Yard. Most CID offices

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maintained a ‘share-out’ regime in which profits from various unofficial
enterprises were distributed according to a well-established protocol
which reflected seniority. The protection worked in two directions, with
subordinates ensuring that any cash went up the ladder to senior
management onside, as well as passing it around at lower level to
maintain cohesion. I later heard that a young probationer detective
constable named Munro had approached Moody and claimed that I had
been responsible for supervising the CID office’s share-out in
Camberwell. Fortunately he was not backed by anybody else at
Camberwell and when word spread of his allegations he became the
subject of threats, and even a beating, and was transferred elsewhere.
Finally, when Moody himself faced criminal conspiracy charges in 1977,
it was the same Munro who gave evidence against him and he was
sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Virgo also received the same
sentence, but his solicitor was the impressive Victor Lissack, and the
conviction was quashed on appeal in March 1978.

In most cases corrupt officers took elaborate measures to cover

themselves, and invariably appointed an intermediary, often a pub
landlord, to hold any illicit payments until a deal had been completed.
The proposition that I would have engaged in taking small sums from
Perry seemed to me to be quite laughable when I was well aware that the
going rate for a ‘bung’ to somebody of my rank and standing was at least
a ‘monkey’, or £500.

The truth was that almost every CID officer had seen examples of
corruption, maybe participated in a ‘whack’ or at least turned a blind eye
to what others were doing. Grotesque as this may sound now, it was a
way of life in those days in which the underworld enjoyed an easy

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working relationship with the forces of law and order. The West End’s
clubs, clip-joints, blue movie cinemas, striptease bars and drinking dens
were making vast profits and the owners, more subtle than the earlier
generation of Maltese hoodlums and street-fighters who had dominated
Soho since the war, were altogether more pragmatic and knew how
vulnerable the poorly paid coppers were. The notorious Messina brothers
had been replaced by ‘Big Frank’ Mifsud and his partner Bernie Silver
who were on their way to establishing a monopoly on peddling vice in
Soho, and by 1968 owned two thirds of the clubs in the area. Similarly,
the pornographers pursued a lucrative trade but needed to ensure some
continuity of supply, and paying off the police was regarded by them as
an entirely acceptable cost of conducting their business. An indication of
the extent to which the CID tolerated corruption can be seen from the
disastrous decision of the Old Harrovian ACC, Peter Brodie, to give
evidence for the defendants in what became known as ‘the Detectives’
Trial’. This ensured the disapproval of the new Commissioner, (Sir)
Robert Mark, who took over in April 1972 and had been brought down to
the capital to clean up the force, and described Brodie’s CID as ‘the most
routinely corrupt organisation in London’. He was quite right, but I was
not keen to be the first to pay the price, especially when I appeared to be
the quarry of a man who demonstrably was one of the most corrupt of the
lot.

Initially the news on the jungle drums was quite encouraging, and
it seemed that Lambert, acting on advice from Richard du Cann QC, had
recommended that no charges should be brought against me and six
others, but that Robson and Harris should be prosecuted. We were to be
returned to our duties, which would have amounted to a complete
clearance, but then I heard of a conference held at the Home Office,

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attended by Moody and John Matthew QC, chaired by the Assistant DPP,
a former barrister who had been placed in charge of supervising any
prosecutions, at which a statement from Ian Harley had been produced,
and this had served to draw attention away from him, and focus on me.
Suddenly the fiasco over Perry’s arrest and interrogation in Nuneaton had
not been the result of a casual, indiscreet remark from Harley to his
prisoner, but an example of corruption, with Perry claiming that he had
paid me for having got him off the Nuneaton charges. I was incredulous
at this turn of events because I had played no part in the decision, taken in
Warwickshire, to free Perry. On the contrary, if anyone had exercised
improper influence over the case it had been Moody who had been so
keen to protect Frankie the Barber! Even worse, I had heard whispers
about the Assistant DPP who had a reputation as a paedophile and regular
visitor to a dirty book shop in Spring Street, Paddington, and certainly
had attended several of the regular, Friday night film shows screened by
the Dirty Squad in their second floor offices at the Yard. Clearly he had
had enjoyed a close relationship with Moody, and when Harley passed
the blame for the Nuneaton episode on to me, I began to worry for the
first time. According to the whispers, Matthew and the Assistant DPP had
recommended that I should go to trial, even though all the others at the
crucial meeting had expressed the view that there was insufficient
evidence to justify bringing any charges. However, it had been a hostile
report from Moody that had persuaded the ADPP, and he in turn had
convinced Matthew. But how could someone like Matthew be turned
around by Moody? While the ADPP’s interest in hardcore porn was
well-known in the Yard, Matthew’s wish for a closer relationship with the
police was also a fact. He had often invited senior officers to his home
and, knowing Moody, I thought it likely that he would have let him know
that he had often been spotted in some of London’s more notorious

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homosexual clubs. A man like Moody would not have not ignored such
an opportunity to apply pressure on someone when the leverage was in
his grasp.

Whatever the explanation for Matthew’s conversion, I soon I heard

that people who had already signed statements clearing me were being re-
interviewed, and encouraged or pressured to make new statements casting
suspicion on me. Some original statements were being destroyed
altogether, and with Moody in control I feared the worst. New detectives,
drawn from outside forces, were deployed in south London to review my
past cases to see if they could smell any corruption, and among the
villains the word went around that anything against Symonds would
prove beneficial, Naturally this kind of incentive inspired plenty of offers
from assistance, including a few from some old lags on remand awaiting
trial. Far from having been fitted up by squads on which I had worked,
these were criminals who had benefited from having dozens of crimes
overlooked entirely in return for a guilty plea. One man I recall was
facing only one charge, with a further forty ‘taken into account’, yet he
was now willing to make a statement implying that there was something
improper in the 'TICs'. According to his tale, I had been drunk in
Camberwell High Road one evening in November 1969 and had solicited
£5 from him. The story was complete nonsense, but the fabricator was
rewarded with probation when he should have been facing two years
inside.

I also heard that Moody had altered a statement made by Perry to

prove ‘an intention of threat’. Quite simply, for any charge against me to
stick, Perry had to demonstrate a direct threat from me, and this was
achieved by the insertion of a single word, ‘if’, in manuscript into Perry’s

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original statement. I was to get copies of both versions, and I was told
that the amendment had been added by Moody, in front of others, in the
DPP’s office. So how could Moody get away with such behaviour? One
answer might be the widespread belief that he had possession of a list,
compiled by the dirty bookshops and porn parlours, of their regular
customers and the subscribers to some of the filthier magazines. Whether
true or not, many believed that Moody exercised influence far beyond the
Yard because of his knowledge of the personal proclivities of the highest
in the land.

Moody’s tampering of Perry’s witness statement was not the only

irregularity that occurred during the enquiry, and one of the most
egregious transgressions was the mysterious loss of the evidence book.
This folder was then central to any criminal case and logged each exhibit
and stamped and numbered every statement. The evidence books are
treated with great care because of their importance, so the disappearance,
soon after Moody’s take-over, was an extraordinary event. Later some of
the earliest statements, which supposedly had been irretrievably lost,
were sent to me by anonymous well-wishers, and those taken from staff
on The Times proved critical when I sought to prove that their tapes had
been mishandled in the newspaper’s offices.

By the time I had realised the degree of Moody’s treachery I had

been very loyal to the firm. Loyalty is very important within a corrupt
police force, and was not unlike the American 'buddy'’ system where you
have to be able to rely absolutely on your colleagues. They expect you to
put your head on the block for them, and you expect them to do the same.
We were all corrupt to an extent, but here was a man who was so corrupt
that he was prepared to fit up a fellow officer. As the truth dawned on me

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I wondered why I had drawn the short straw. Was this a ritual sacrifice, or
was there more to it? Lambert and Yorke had been replaced on the
enquiry by Moody and Virgo, and such completely inappropriate
manoeuvres suggested the informed connivance of the Yard’s top
commander, Dick Chitty, and maybe the DAC, John du Rose. Could they
really have been compromised by Moody? There had always been a
suspicion that Moody and Virgo enjoyed a measure of protection right at
the top, and the lengths they had taken to prevent Williamson or his men
from interviewing Frankie Holbert certainly suggested there were other
very senior officers with much to lose in any widespread, external
investigation into the Met’s corruption. Williamson had been bamboozled
into limiting his provincial officers to pursuing non-Met leads, leaving
the key players in the hands of a pair of arguably the most dishonest men
ever employed by the Yard, who clearly wanted to close down what had
become known as 'the Nuneaton aspect'. The options open to me were
limited, and although I sent word to Moody that I had received almost
weekly updates on what had been happening in the OPS< I was reluctant
to threaten him. This was an officer who was so powerful and so
confident that on Masonic ladies nights he would openly flaunt his
friendships with the most notorious pornographers, fraudsters, crooked
bookies and their wives. Only someone who knew he was immune could
behave in such a manner.

The only crumb of comfort for me was the decision, taken in

January 1971, to try me separately from Robson and Harris. This strategy
had been the subject of much discussion with my lawyers who felt that
the case against them was much stronger and therefore we should either
be tried together and get the tapes disallowed, or have my trial first. The
worst option was for my trial to follow their conviction, and I was always

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certain they would be found guilty. Although The Times had lumped the
three of us together, our cases were truly quite different and completely
unrelated, apart from the link of Perry. Robson had certainly planted
gelignite on Perry, and Harris had been very active on the side, but all I
could be accused of, or so I thought, was my rather silly recruitment spiel
which really could not be taken seriously.

Initially the prosecution had wanted all three of us to appear at the

Bailey together, and have all twenty-four tapes played, one after another,
which had suited me, but that position was to change. In truth there was
little to connect me with this pair from the Yard, apart from the dubious
role of Michael Perry, and I was not committed for trial, to face just eight
charges, until March 1971, a full fifteen months after publication of the
story in The Times. Even the most jaundiced of bystanders could not fail
to see how unfair this delay was on the defendants, and within a month
one of the charges, of having obtained £10 from an ex-boxer, Roy
Thomas, was withdrawn.

This episode illustrated the way the climate had changed at the
Yard, and the lengths to which the country bumpkins would go to nail
me. The strategy, of preferring a whole raft of charges and then dropping
most of them, was one I knew well, and was intended to be highly
prejudicial. Thomas, known as ‘Tasty Tom’, was a black, one-eyed
bouncer at a club in Sydenham, and when he heard that there would be
favours for anyone supplying information about me he volunteered the
allegation that he had given me £10 corruptly. The story was a complete
fabrication as became clear when it took five officers to persuade him to
come to court to give evidence at the committal proceedings. As soon as
he went into the witness box he withdrew his statement, saying he was

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wrong in the head, and the charge was dropped. This was, for me, quite a
significant development because although I had always been confident
that there was no real evidence for a conviction, I was concerned that I
might fall victim to the kind of behaviour I was all too familiar with,
namely people going to prison for offences they had not committed.
Could that really happen to me? I was becoming increasingly anxious
about my chances of an acquittal, and after two and a half years the strain
was beginning to show. I had endured all the rumours of a fit-up, and had
received a couple of death threats, and had nearly been beguiled by the
advice from one group of well-wishers who urged me to plead guilty to a
charge that had a maximum sentence of two years. They pointed out
helpfully that I had not been arrested, but instead had received a
summons to answer the £50 charge. I could expect credit for a guilty plea,
and a short sentence which would be served in a cushy open prison where
I could do plenty of reading, and there was the promise that I would be
looked after upon my release. Furthermore. My conviction on such a
petty charge would be expunged with a few years under the terms of the
Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. To make sure I truly understood what
was on offer, Moody sent one of his pornographers, John Mason, down to
my cottage in Orpington to guarantee me a job managing one of his shops
once I had served my sentence. He even offered to set me up with
premises in Sevenoaks before my trial so I could be occupied while I was
suspended. There were several problems with Mason’s offer, not the least
of which is the geographical fact that Sevenoaks is a little off the Met’s
ground, and therefore Moody’s proposal was probably completely bogus.
Although he had not realised it, Mason’s embroidery of Moody’s
suggestion had back-fired, and served only to alert me to the danger I was
in.

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 Later, an alternative suggestion was put to me, that I should apply
for an ill-health pension on the grounds that I was mad, a procedure
known as ‘doing a Challoner’. I had paid into a pension scheme for
twenty years and was assured that, at the age of thirty-seven, I could
easily claim to have succumbed to the strain of my long suspension. I
rejected this proposal on the grounds that I was not willing to involve
myself in any fakery, and anyway to declare myself insane was the last
resort of the guilty man, and I knew I had not committed the crime I was
charged with. If I was to pretend to be a lunatic, I would be discredited
forever.

Although I had asked several times for meetings with Moody, I

only saw him on one occasion, during my formal interview at Tintagel
House. On the advice of my solicitor, Victor Lissack, who sat beside me,
I declined to answer any of the questions, and during a break in these
rather one-sided, fruitless proceedings, I visited the gents where I was
joined by Moody who told me I was ‘doing well’ and that I should ‘keep
it going like that’. Thus he was encouraging me to refuse to answer his
questions! At that point I really lost it, called him a bastard, and accused
him of doing the dirty on me. “If I go down, I’ll take you with me” I said
with venom, which certainly took him aback. For a moment there was the
bizarre scene of a detective sergeant on the brink of ruin threatening an
apparently untouchable chief superintendent, yet he looked really
worried. I then stormed out, saying not another word. In retrospect, I
think I was probably quite lucky, as Moody was always quick with his
fists, although he may have thought the better of mixing it with a younger
man who also knew his way around the boxing ring.

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 During this period my relationship with Lissack deteriorated
through a lack of trust. Initially, when he had been quick to act on my
behalf, and had come highly recommended by the Yard, his links to
senior officers had been an advantage, but as the situation had changed,
and I increasingly saw many of my former colleagues as the adversary, I
began to see Lissack in a rather different light. He had been one of the
regular attendees at the police boxing evenings, and he unquestionably
had the very best connections. He and a few other trusted solicitors had
built a very lucrative practices based almost entirely on police ‘private’
business, which encompassed divorce and house conveyancing for
individual officers, as well as litigation and criminal work. But was all
this influence-peddling, from a small office in Covent Garden
conveniently opposite Bow street nick, being translated into influence on
my behalf? It certainly did not look like it to me, and shortly before the
committal proceedings, at a pre-trial hearing at Wells Street Magistrates
Court, I decided to sack him when he insisted on representing me without
counsel, and find another solicitor. The crunch had come when the other
defendants were represented by QCs and juniors, but I was not and
Lissack insisted I could not have Sir Edward Gardiner. A very public row
ensued, and Lissack dramatically threw down his file and stormed out of
the court, telling the magistrate that he had just been fired by his client.
Under normal circumstances to switch horses mid-stream would have
been sheer folly, but my strategy was ‘to look on the other side of the
fence’, in the police ‘black book’ for someone considered to be hostile to
the Met. This unofficial folder, held in the safe of every police station,
was a list of lawyers who were considered by the police to be unreliable
and with a long record of complaints. This did not mean they were
actually bent, in which case they might be useful to the CID, but rather
that they could not be relied upon to cooperate, took on unpopular causes

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and were suspected of recording their telephone conversations. They
were, in the main, left-wing, anti-establishment and generally the kind of
people I would never want to be associated with, but needs must, and top
of the list was Ben Birnberg, who had an office on the poor side of
London Bridge. My decision to hire him to represent him was one of the
best I ever made, and I never regretted it. I told him that he came highly
recommended because he topped the list in the black book, and he
worked extraordinarily hard to prepare himself for the imminent
committal proceedings. When this preliminary hearing took place he had
completely mastered his brief because he had worked day and night to
prepare my defence, and when eventually I was committed, it was to
answer a single charge of accepting a puny £150. Birnberg was not
surprised by my disclosure about the black book, and later he raised Cain
about the scandal, leading to the Tard scrapping the system.

The strain of preparing my defence, resisting the pressure and

being on suspension took its toll, and over those two years I lost six stone
in weight. My health was collapsing and I had a brief, not very restorative
stay at the Met’s nursing home in Denmark Hill with hepatitis. This was
to be followed by a period at the convalescent home in Hove, but the
senior management stepped in to exclude me, as though my corruption
might contaminate the other patients. Finally, I accepted my doctor’s
advice to take long holiday and decided to accompany my girlfriend
Barbara to visit her father’s war grave in Tunisia, instead of going to the
Met’s convalescent home by the seaside. A soldier in the Scots Guards,
he had been killed at Tobruk just before she was born, and she had
promised herself a pilgrimage to North Africa. I drove us down to
Algeciras in a motor caravan, receiving a friendly wave goodbye at Dover
from (Sir) Peter Imbert, the future Commissioner who was then the

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Special Branch duty DI at the departure ramp, and I soon found myself I
found myself at the Sundance Village, a holiday resort near Rabat in
Morocco, enjoying the sunshine and eating large quantities of oranges, as
prescribed by my doctor.

I had never intended to flee the country, and I had several good
reasons for remaining in England. I was recently divorced, had three
young children, and my mother, now a widow, was of an age when it
would not have been fait for me to ask her to look after them. Yet that is
exactly what I found I had to do, albeit with the greatest reluctance. My
relationship with the Yard had deteriorated to the point that I knew my
life was in danger. Lissack had obviously spread the word that I had
prepared a dossier on the activities of named detectives, and of course I
had threatened Moody, which probably had been unwise. Whilst I would
never have been intimidated by some thug approaching me in the street
with an axe, promising to do me in, as happened, the veiled hints from
men in suits, couched in Masonic language, was far more sinister. ‘The
craft’ had turned against me, and this development was of far greater
concern to me than being confronted by a group of hired muscle outside a
pub in Kent where I had an appointment to meet a contact. On that
occasion they made the mistake of failing to knock me out with their first
blow, on the back of my head, and I rounded on them to deliver a good
pasting, on a scale that the pub’s regulars still talk about it. This was no
coincidental encounter for one of my assailants spoke in a Glaswegian
accent and called me ‘Jimmy’, a voice and name I recognised from one of
several anonymous calls I had received.

The extraordinary influence of Freemasonry on the Met cannot be

underestimated, and within the police the ‘Jockafia’ was especially

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potent. Whereas the masons in England have a minimum age of twenty-
one for membership, the sons of masons in Scotland can join their
father’s lodge at nineteen, thus making some Scots policemen
‘Jocksonic’, enjoying a two year advantage over their English
contemporaries, receiving the benefit of accelerated promotion based
entirely on their links with the lodge. Certainly nobody in the Met ever
wondered why there were a quite disproportionate number of Scots in
senior positions.

In those days of back-room deals and unspoken influence, ijt was

not unknown for witnesses to disappear, and I had crossed entirely the
wrong people. Furthermore, I could expect no help even from the straight
officers I knew at the Yard because I had become the victim of a
whispering campaign. I shall never forget the incredible news from
Robson that Harris had been to see Dick Chitty and had alleged that I, as
a former army officer with competition experience, was a crack shot and
owned a weapon with a night scope. Supposedly I was preparing to shoot
Michael Perry with a sniper’s rifle from a position in a block of flats
opposite his mother’s home, and Robson was to be my getaway driver.
Apparently Harris had been approached by us to act as look-out and let us
know when our target was in the vicinity. I scoffed at the suggestion, later
put to me by Lambert’s intermediary, Mike Smith, although I may have
been unwise when I added that “the thought had never occurred to me,
but if anyone was going to get shot, it would be that bastard Harris! This
off-the-cuff remark unfortunately betrayed the fact, which would have
been relayed to Lambert, that I had been warned that an attempt had been
made by Harris to negotiate a deal and turn Queen’s Evidence. None of
his tale about a murder plot was true, but in those difficult times my
comment about wanting to bump off Harris may have been taken

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seriously, and certainly proved that I was receiving information from
inside Lambert’s inquiry. In reality, I was confident that Harris had
nothing incriminating to say about me, which was why he had been
obliged to invent a cock-and-bull assassination story. If I had planned to
kill Perry I certainly would not have confided in Harris, whom I hardly
knew. Anyway, in peaceful Morocco these were but unpleasant
memories, and I was content to recover my health and prepare myself for
my trial, now set for July because the prosecution had been granted even
more time to examine the fourteen remaining dodgy tapes relevant to my
case.

Rather less enjoyable were the English newspaper reports of the

Old Bailey trial of Harris and Robson, and their gaol sentence on 3 March
1972 of six and seven years respectively. The trial lasted seven weeks and
their defence counsel, (Sir) James Comyn QC, used four experts to
undermine the authenticity of the tapes on which Perry’s supposedly
incriminating conversations had been recorded. The strategy was to
discredit the recordings and explain the behaviour of the two officers as
the necessary conduct of two excellent thief-takers. Intimidation,
blackmail and threats were, they claimed, part of the rough-and-tumble of
dealing with the underworld, and Perry had only been threatened with
being charged with possession of gelignite, so no harm had been done
and a potentially valuable informant with direct knowledge of many
crimes had been recruited. As for the talk of money, the references had
been to payments that would be made by the detectives to Perry for
information, not to cash extorted from him. Unfortunately the jury
seemed shocked by Robson’s admission that he had used the gelignite to
entrap Perry, and did not recognise this tactic as what might nowadays be
called ‘noble cause’ corruption. Perry was a hardened, professional

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criminal, and while unorthodox (and illegal), the method of acquiring his
fingerprints on the explosive had proved a powerful encouragement to
wavering informants. As for the tapes, four independent experts testified
that all but one of the tapes were copies, and they showed distinct signs of
having been edited. Even the prosecution’s principal engineer
acknowledged that the tapes had been interfered with, so the only expert
willing to confirm their authenticity was a phonetics specialist from a
Home Office laboratory who testified that he thought they were genuine.
However, as his salary was paid by the Home Office, he could hardly be
described as independent or impartial.

I knew the tapes had been tampered with because at one point in
my conversation with Perry we had both joked about a man who had been
hanging around nearby with a camera lens sticking out of his coat.
Pointing to him, I had asked Perry “Is he one of ours or one of yours?”
We had both thought this quite funny, but the entire exchange had been
deleted from the tape. This, combined with concerns about the ‘continuity
of handling’, should have been enough to sink the prosecution.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this evidence was that

someone had tampered with the tapes, and when I sat in the public
gallery, taking notes, as James Comyn opened for the defence, I was
surprised to see that this very senior silk appeared to be pulling his
punches, and made no criticism of the conduct of the newspaper. There
was no mention of the illegal use of a telephone tap, no criticism of the
illegal recordings, and no full frontal assault on the integrity of the
journalists. Naturally, as this performance was likely to be a rehearsal of
my own forthcoming prosecution I was aghast at the strategy and
reported every detail to my solicitor and barrister. Their explanation was

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hardly comforting. Apparently Comyn had volunteered to join the
defence team pro bono, and his offer had been accepted with enthusiasm
by Robson and Harris, although they had been worried by his advice that
any direct attack on The Times would be counter-productive. I was
mystified by this, and even more alarmed when I heard a possible
explanation. Comyn lived in County Meath in Ireland, and was a near
neighbour of Lord Thomson. Without being unduly conspiratorial, it
occurred to me that it would have been in the interests of the proprietor of
The Times, supposedly ‘the Top people’s paper’ to ensure that the
newspaper escaped any criticism, and what better way than to exercise
some influence over the defence?

The trial cost an estimated half million pounds, and resulted in two
‘efficient and conscientious’ officers receiving long prison sentences for a
measly £275 in bribes and blackmail. Robson had made twenty-two
arrests in operation COATHANGER alone, Harris had received ten
commendations. Perry, on the other hand, was soon back at the Bailey, to
be convicted of forging bankers’ drafts to steal 100,000 cigarettes, which
earned him a sentence of eighteen months, on to which was added a
suspended sentence of two years which he had received for the Peckham
van theft. His co-defendant was James Laming, brother of Robert and the
only other person to have supported Perry’s allegations.

In June 1973 Robson and Harris took their case to the Court of
Appeal, claiming that the judge, Mr Justice Sebag Shaw, had erred when
he had allowed the jury to retain copies of the disputed tape transcripts
throughout the trial. This decision had been plainly prejudicial to the
defendants, but the Appeal Court judges were not in the mood to find
against one of their colleagues, and rejected the appeal.

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 With the conviction of Robson and Harris the mood in London
changed dramatically. The CID was despondent that a man with Perry’s
form could put away two good detectives, and what chance would they
have in prison? They had received the most savage of sentences, and I
Knew I could expect much of the same. The climate of public opinion
had swung against the Yard, and even before the end of the trial a report
of Commander Ken Drury were published in the People, relaxing on a
two week holiday in Famagusta, Cyprus, with the porn merchant and
strip-club owner Jimmy Humphreys. Nor was this the only scandal to hid
the Yard, for the elite Drug Squad was itself to be busted by Customs &
Excise, with its chief, Vic Kellaher, and five of his subordinates being
charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice. Finally, in
November 1973, Kellaher would be acquitted, but three of his detectives
were convicted of perjury and imprisoned.

As for the Dirty Squad, Mark ordered an entirely new clean-up to

be conducted by a specially-formed team, the Anti-Corruption Squad
which operated in parallel with the feared ‘rubber heels’ of A10. Headed
by DAC Gilbert Kelland, it prosecuted fifteen officers and obtained
convictions against thirteen of them who went to prison for a total of 96
years. Altogether about forty detectives were investigated, and more than
half wisely opted to leave the force straightaway rather than face
disciplinary charges. Kelland’s principal witness was Jimmy Humphreys,
who was imprisoned for eight years on an assault charge, and his very
detailed diary which listed most of his contacts with corrupt CID officers.
His wife, Rusty, was imprisoned for running a brothel in Greek Street,
and overnight his empire and influence vanished.

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 Once Kelland had acquired Humphreys’ diary, some pages of his
proposed autobiography and his testimony taken in a prison cell, Soho
was raided by a new Serious Crimes Squad, headed by DCS Albert
Wickstead, who worked not from the Yard, where there was a fear of
contamination from the Flying Squad, but from Limehouse police station.
Wickstead had spent his career in the East End and had gone about his
business with an almost religious zeal. Forty tons of porn was recovered
on their first raids in Soho where the managers protested that they had
already paid their dues to the Dirty Squad. Bernie Silver, convicted of
living off immoral earnings for the past eighteen years, went down for six
years, and his enforcer, Mifsud, was convicted of jury tampering. As for
their police associates, the blood-letting was truly terrible. Drury and
Virgo, who had retired from the force, were arrested at their homes, and
Moody, who had taken a medical pension, was also taken into custody.
This was astonishing, for Virgo had been the Met’s longest-serving
officer and arguably one of the most powerful men on the force. At the
subsequent Old Bailey trials, no less than seventeen pornographers gave
evidence against the detectives, as did four former members of the OPS.
After the Drugs Squad and the Dirty Squad had been hit, it was the turn
of the elite Flying Squad, and its former commander, Ken Drury, went
down for eight years and DI Adam Ingram for four.

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

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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

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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.

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 II
Bulgaria

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

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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.

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 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

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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.

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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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 Chapter II
Bulgaria

I was to recover my health and enjoy myself in Bulgaria, and in no time

at all I began a passionate affair with Nina Ebert, a pretty German woman
whom I met at the Kukeri beach bar, who was on holiday on the Black
Sea, sharing a room with a friend who happened to be a travel agent and
coach party courier. During one of our long moonlight walks, she
confided to me that her husband, who worked for a German organisation
lobbying for East-West reunification, had told her that there was a rumour
circulating in Bonn that papers in Chancellor Willi Brandt’s private office
had reached Moscow. Naturally I was surprised to be told this, and I
assumed that Nina, her supposedly indiscreet husband and her tale about
Willi Brandt was some kind of weird test dreamed up by Nick to assess
my reliability. In these circumstances, thinking my bona-fides were under
scrutiny, I played along with what I perceived as a rather unsubtle game
and reported Nina’s story to Nick who showed convincing enthusiasm.
Indeed, after he had passed the information up the food-chain I was
instructed to pursue Nina with greater urgency to learn more, which was
not so easy because, at that time, I had met Anka Mladinova, whose
father was, she told me, the chief prosecutor, a self-taught lawyer who
had started his career on the railways. A very attractive blonde, Anka
worked as a nurse at a government hospital and later she was to become
the private nurse of the Bulgarian president, Todor Zhivkov, the longest-
surviving Communist leader. After his death, following the collapse of
Communism, she went to live in his secret apartment in Bavaria. I had
little doubt that Anka had been planted on me by the KDS, the feared
security apparatus, to test my story and assess whether I might be some
kind of hostile agent, but the reality was that I had cut my ties with

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England and needed to start a new life. Candidly, I was indifferent to
whether Anka was spying on me, as she was fabulously attractive and
was obviously well-connected with the regime’s decision-makers. The
KGB and the KDS may have thought I was being manipulated, but life in
Sofia, even in my assigned apartment in a militia barracks, was a lot more
comfortable than the alternative, working as a mercenary in some
mosquito-ridden corner of Africa. The other option, of a return to
London, hardly bore thinking about.

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

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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.

Guillaume had arrived in the Federal Republic as a refugee in

1956, four years after he had joined the East German army as a loyal
Communist Party member and had served as an officer with the rank of
captain. He had also been trained as an agent, and when he settled in

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Frankfurt, supposedly as an authentic refugee, he had joined the SDP as a
voluntary worker before becoming a full-time party functionary. In 1970
he had expressed the wish to become a civil servant in Bonn and, having
sailed through a security check which failed to reveal his service as an
officer in the East German army, had been appointed to the economic and
social affairs staff of the Chancellery. Soon afterwards Brandt had picked
him to act as his link to the SDP, and he maintained an office both in the
party’s headquarters and in the Palais Schomburg. For the next three
years Guillaume enjoyed access to the very highest classifications of
secret information and passed it back to Wolf who shared it with
Moscow. As well as material about the FRG’s foreign policy and
relations with NATO, Guillaume passed on details of Brandt’s rather
exotic extra-marital affairs which, at that time, were completely unknown
to the public. The spy’s run of luck ended when suspicions were raised
about the existence of a top-level mole with direct access to Brandt, and
the BfV had launched an investigation which turned out to be not quite
discreet enough, with word of it leaking to me through Nina. Exactly how
the BfV got on to Guillaume remains a matter of speculation, and much
of what has been written about the case, including by Markus Wolf, has
suggested that the BfV had initiated an investigation after a study had
been conducted of illicit East-West communications and found traces of
an illegal codenamed GEORG who had completed several missions in the
1950s. Allegedly a detailed analysis of contemporary decrypted East
German wireless traffic had revealed a message, dating back to April
1957, in which a source known as ‘G.G.’ had been sent birthday
greetings. Supposedly his clue had led he BfV molehunters to conduct a
lengthy trawl for anyone with the same birthday, and eventually the field
had narrowed to Guillaume’s son Pierre. ‘G.G.’ was somehow linked to
the missions undertaken by GEORG, and both agents were tentatively

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identified as Guillaume who had been placed under intensive
surveillance.

Personally, I have my doubts about this version of events, for two

reasons. Firstly there is scarcely a single example in the history of
espionage in which a spy has been caught by unprompted sleuthing or
that frequent cover story, the vigilance of colleagues. In most cases there
is a straightforward tip-off from a defector who uses his knowledge for
resettlement in the Florida sunshine with a swimming-pool and a
generous pension plan. Secondly, there was the information I had
acquired from Nina who had suggested that the BfV had been working on
advice from the British. She had no reason to lie, and this was at such an
early stage that it was most unlikely to have been part of an elaborate
cover story. Indeed, if it was a cover story it must have been a bad one
because it has never appeared anywhere else.

What is known definitely is that Gunter Nollau, the BfV’s counter-

intelligence chief briefed his Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher,
on 29 May 1973 and informed him that Guillaume was the subject of an
investigation. Wolf was probably told about this much later by his star
mole in the BfV, Klaus Kuron (who had offered to spy for the HVA in
1982, and continued undetected until the collapse of East Germany in
1989), but instead of moving Guillaume away from access, no action was
taken, and this inertia led to Nollau’s subsequent resignation. Thus, much
to everybody’s embarrassment, Guillaume was allowed to continue
spying for eleven months before he was finally confronted, and even
allowed to accompany Brandt on his holiday to his hideaway retreat at
Hamas in Norway. During these final months Christel reported that she
thought she was being watched but Wolf had not taken much notice of

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this warning, on the assumption that agents often develop a healthy
degree of paranoia, and he had failed to extract his two agents before
finally they were confronted by the BfV. He was also influenced, so he
admitted later, by Christel’s new job as an aide to Georg Leber, Brandt’s
Defence Minister.

Whatever the source of the initial tip, Guillaume came under

intensive surveillance, which he also spotted, and was arrested by the
BfV early in the morning on 24 April 1974, thus provoking a major
political scandal that led to Brandt’s resignation just twelve days later.
When the police had burst into his house, Guilaume had not attempted to
deny he was a spy, but instead had identified himself proudly as an
officer and citizen of the GDR, and demanded the appropriate, respectful
treatment!

Fortunately, my warning had come too late to prevent Guillaume’s

arrest, but the fact that I had been able to obtain this information must
have impressed Nick and his masters. As for Guillaume, he was
sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment in Rheinbach prison, outside
Bonn, and Christel received eight. Suffering from kidney disease, he was
released in October 1981 in a spy-swap, and returned as a hero to East
Germany, where he died in April 1995. According to KGB gossip,
Leonid Brezhnev had been angered by the KGB’s failure to pull
Guillaume out of Bonn in time, and Markus Wolf had been summoned to
Moscow to be reprimanded by the General-Secretary himself, in his
office in the Kremlin. Indeed, Wolf himself later admitted that the entire
affair had been ‘unfortunate’, not least because it had destroyed Willy
Brandt’s political career, and he had been responsible for developing
Ostpolitik, a policy of détente that had been greatly welcomed by the

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Soviet Bloc. Brandt’s initiative had led to diplomatic recognition of the
GDR, and the signing of the Four-Power Treaty which had preserved
West Berlin as a permanent, separate entity, both key objectives of the
Communists. By ruining Brandt, the Soviet Bloc had played into the
hands of the anti-Socialist hardliners and terminated détente, which the
Kremlin had been so anxious to encourage. The extent to which the KGB
had participated in the Guillaume affair is unknown, but according to the
KGB rezident in Karlshorst, Sergei Kondrashev, the information from the
spy codenamed HANSEN was ‘of such extraordinary importance’ that
the KGB’s Chairman, Yuri Andropov often passed it personally straight
to Andrei Gromyko, Brezhnev’s foreign minister. An officer messenger
then waited for him to read the material, ‘information of the best quality
on the situation in Germany and on discussions with the Western
powers’, and returned it to the KGB’s headquarters. After Guillaume’s
exposure Brezhnev had written a personal note to Brandt denying any
personal knowledge of the espionage, but few had believed him because
he too must have been one of his recipients and beneficiaries.

Certainly, in political terms, Guillaume was in a position to

reassure the Soviet bloc that détente was not a ruse, and supply crucial
reports in 1973, when a potentially damaging political split had
developed over policy between President Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger on one side, and Washington DC’s European partners in NATO
on the other. Such reliable information, in large quantities from a trusted
source with proven, virtually unrestricted access, is the dream of every
spy-master, but Wolf’s failure to act on my warning and the source was
terminated, later forcing him to acknowledge that the episode had been
“an own goal,, a bad one”. By then, however, Wolf’s almost
mythological reputation had been established, and in January 1974 he had

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been awarded the GDR’s most coveted decoration, the Karl Marx medal,
while his minister, Erich Miekle, had been appointed to full membership
of the Politburo.

Upon my return to Sofia I was met at the airport by the Soviet

ambassador, General Sheventenko, who took me to a luxury flat in the
centre of the city, formerly occupied by the ex-leader of the Greek
Communist Party, and told to make it my own, as this was a reward for
what I had accomplished for the KGB. It was a modern block, probably
built just before the war, and my neighbour was an exceptionally tall
woman, a former member of a handball team, who managed Radio
Bulgaria’s English transmissions and compiled a weekly broadcast, not
unlike Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America. Her husband, who was
even taller, spent much of the year on an engineering project in Nigeria,
so he was around very little. She told me a little of my apartment’s former
occupant, which explained why it was decorated with relief wall maps of
Greece.

It was at this point that it was explained to me that the KGB had
more plans for me, back in Africa. I had been given a warm welcome, but
I was keen to returned to Rabat to be reunited with Barbara and meet my
baby son Alex. My limited task, as I then saw it, had come to an end, and
I was back in Africa, in good health and available to resume my work as a
mercenary. However, this was not quite what the KGB had in mind for
me, and my new role, as explained to me in Sofia, was to travel to
Zambia and then Tanzania where, ostensibly, I was to manage a
photographic safari business, the Selous Safari Park at Oyster Bay owned
by an expatriate Briton, John Bailey. In reality I was taking instructions
from a tall thin Russian who was supervising the construction of the new

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embassy in Lusaka, to cultivate vulnerable American diplomats and gain
their confidence in the hope of recruiting them as sources. One of my
missions had been to penetrate a British radio relay station outside
Lusaka and report on any prospect of recruiting a source among the
operators who were mainly ex-Royal Navy. Another mission was to
Tanzania to report on the Chinese railways, and a supposedly secret
airfield at Morogoro where I found a job with Humphrey Luckhurst as the
manager of the Selous Safari Lodge until the beginning of the rainy
season. This did not last long, and I planned to move to an island to help
run a game fishing business, but a well-timed invitation to Moscow
interrupted, just as I had been robbed of a large quantity of cash during a
visit to the Bambino Club in Lusaka. Suddenly very short of money, an
all expenses paid trip to Moscow sounded attractive.

It was during this period, as I travelled across Africa talent-spotting

likely targets that Nick visited me with a special message of
encouragement: my information about Guillaume had proved absolutely
authentic, and I had been congratulated by Leonid Brezhnev himself.
Nick wanted me to come back to Moscow immediately, but I had too
much work to do, and instead asked Nick to wait for a couple of weeks.
Instead, Nick went swimming in the Indian Ocean where he encountered
hundreds of Portuguese Men O’War and was badly stung. I am amazed
he survived this experience, but he assured me that he was a bear hunter
from Siberia, and could survive anything!

As I was preparing to travel to Moscow I went to see the KGB

rezident in Dar-es-Salaam who asked me to make contact with an
American woman, the collector of shells who went beachcombing every
day, and was married to the local Pan Am representative. According to

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the rezident, he was also suspected of being a CIA officer working under
non-official cover, and my task was to befriend her and find out as much
as I could about his real job.

To make the encounter plausible I borrowed a book on shells,

published by the oil company, from Luckhurst and pretended to be
another collector so I could have an excuse to bump into her. Sure
enough, according to plan, I ambled along the beach the next afternoon
and spotted the woman carrying a wicker basket searching the sand for
useful specimens. Within minutes we were chatting, although my
knowledge of the subject was soon exhausted we continued to walk
together, and she gently chastised me for using a plastic bag to collect
shells because some contained dangerous toxins and their spikes could
easily puncture the plastic, and my skin. Apparently this was a common
hazard for shell collectors in the tropics, but she seemed unconcerned at
my lack of professionalism. It seemed that my rather flimsy cover as an
amateur had worked, and she invited me back to her house for a drink.
Wishing to take my assignment slowly, I declined, but instead took her
out to lunch at a nearby beach restaurant the following day, and
afterwards we returned to her home where she took me up to her bedroom
to show me her collection of shells. She also made it obvious that she was
interested in more than my sparkling conversation and pretty soon we
were writhing in bed, ripping each other’s clothes off and indulging in
some passionate love-making. By the early evening, when I left her
asleep with a gentle kiss on her cheek, I slipped quietly out of the house,
none the wiser about her husband’s occupation. I had intended to move
onto stage two of my mission the next day, but events overtook me.

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 This episode resulted in her visiting Humphrey Luckhurst the next
morning, sporting a black eye, and she asked him to tip me off that her
husband had found out about our tryst and was after me. As a precaution I
moved out of my hotel and stayed with Gloria, my English girlfriend who
worked for the United Nations, and kept away from the lovely
beachcomber. There was a curious sequel to this because when I finally
left Dar-es-Salaam for Ethiopia a group of Americans got on the same
plane who seemed quite hostile towards me. They all gave me what I took
to be threatening glances and, fearing some ugly incident, I decided not to
leave the plane with them when we landed. Sure enough, the US
ambassador’s limousine drew up beside the aircraft and I realised the
Americans were probably planning to snatch me as I came down the steps
and maybe bundle me into the car. This may not be the kind of behaviour
one might expect at an international airport, but even in those days all
sorts of strange things happened in Addis Ababa. Fortunately, at that
moment a group of Soviets turned up to escort me into the city, and the
Americans were left scowling on the tarmac, apparently infuriated at
having lost their chance to abduct me, or worse. I was dropped at my
hotel, where I checked in, and then left a chalk mark on the wall outside
as a signal to the local KGB. Doubtless they knew already of my arrival,
but this procedure was to indicate my readiness for a rendezvous.
According to my contact, whom I met the following day, the
commendation I had received over the Guillaume affair had resulted in an
invitation to Moscow, and my first step in my journey to the Soviet Union
was an exchange of passports. I surrendered John Freeman’s passport and
received one in the name of Eddie Herbert, together with an Aeroflot
ticket, which I used to board a flight to Sheremetyevo. When the plane
pulled to a halt and the doors opened I was welcomed by Nick’s big,
smiling face, and a very impressive welcoming, uniformed committee at

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the bottom of the steps who gave me a smart salute. I was ushered
through the airport controls, avoiding all the usual formalities, and as I
only had cabin luggage with me, we walked straight through the terminal,
with our military escort alongside until I was in the back of a limousine.
It seemed I was some kind of a hero, for this was the kind of reception
that I had seen Ken Drury have at the Yard. The official car took us down
an empty, central lane of the highway and soon I had my first sight of
Moscow. My first impression was of a very well organised city, though
‘regulated’ might be a more appropriate term. We passed huge buildings,
set well back from the wide boulevards, and I was struck by the contrast
of London and its higgledy-piggledy houses crowding in on the narrow
roads. As I was gazing at Stalin’s wedding-cake skyscrapers Nick leaned
over and said ‘We’re almost there’, as if he thought I had finally arrived
at my ideological home.

We rolled up at a huge hotel, the Rossiya, overlooking St Basil’s

Cathedral and the Kremlin, and as I stepped out of the car I was treated as
a VIP, with the manager rushing forward to welcome me, help me
register, and show me up to a magnificent suite. The lavish experience
was so unreal that I began to get nervous, thinking that they must be up to
something, and it would not last. Would it be like Bulgaria, where I had
been given a night in luxury, followed by a month in the relative slum of
the Struga? I decided to enjoy myself, and over the next few days I was
given a whirlwind tour of all the major tourist sites, including a shuffle
past old Lenin in his mausoleum. There was no waiting for hours in a
queue outside, and we went straight to the front. At one point, when I
mentioned how cold it was, I was presented with a fur hat of the kind
worn only by generals and important politicians. Initially I was a little
nervous about wearing it because I worried that it might be swapped ot

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swiped whenever I checked it in, but I soon learned that its quality gave it
a ‘swipe-me-not’ status. Protected by the respect its owner must
command in this oppressed society, it was untouchable.

The highlight of my visit to Moscow was a magnificent banquet

that took place in the Rossiya’s rooftop restaurant, guarded by uniformed
KGB men at the entrance, where there was a large gathering of
intelligence professionals, entertained by a band. Nick showed me the
impressive night view from a huge picture window, and then showed me
to my table for dinner. I soon gained the impression that this was some
kind of initiation ceremony, not unlike some of the Masonic meetings I
had attended in London. However, this was a state function, and I was
escorted around the tables to be introduced everyone before they tucked
in to the magnificent spread laid before us? Was this a regular event, or
one thrown for my benefit? Either way, I enjoyed the apparently
unlimited quantities of vodka, caviar, and salmon, interrupted only by
frequent toasts and the constant appearance of senior officers at our table
who were keen to make themselves known to me, with Nick interpreting
in between mouthfuls. These, I presumed, were KGB management types
from the Lubyanka who rarely left Moscow, and they were welcoming
me into a fraternity. Among the dignitaries, completely unknown to me at
the time, was Georgi Tsinev, the KGB’s First Deputy Chairman, and
Brezhnev’s brother-in-law. No longer on probation, I was now aboard. It
was not unlike a mafia celebration, in which I was being introduced to
‘the firm’, but the difference was that I was the golden boy with a
commendation from Brezhnev himself, and everyone present was aware
of it. The fact that this was, in my opinion, sheer beginner’s luck, as I had
bumped into Nina entirely accidentally, with no planning involved, was
apparently irrelevant. I had scored a considerable coup for the KGB and

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this was my reward. An invitation to Moscow was, so I was informed, a
rare and signal honour for a field agent, and when I realised I was being
feted as a star, and began to act the part. Certainly I looked the role, being
relatively young, much fitter than I had been for years, deeply tanned by
an African sun, and probably the embodiment of the white hunter, just in
from the bush. With the KGB so used to dealing with homosexuals like
Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, I must have appeared as a refreshing
change, and few could doubt my heterosexual credentials. I had
succeeded on all my assignments in Africa, and even in the single episode
in Cotonou where my target had appeared reluctant; Kate had delivered
the goods in the end. That particular experience had resulted in warnings
being circulated to all KGB rezidenturas, alerting them to the possibility
that the CIA had adopted the tactic of employing hookers to entrap its
adversaries.

The banquet, evidently thrown in my honour, had the desired

impact on me. For the past couple of years I had been a fugitive, looking
over my shoulder, operating under a false identity and living on my wits.
Now I was being feted by Moscow’s most senior intelligence officers and
toasted as a hero. Nothing like this could ever have happened in England,
either in the army or the police, both hidebound rigid structures
handicapped by a class system and snobbery. Yet here I was, surrounded
by the top of the tree, celebrating the quality of information contained in
my dossier. This was the same information that had become so dangerous
for me in London, and later would be ridiculed and rejected by that other
supposed British elite, the Security Service. Of course, as I was to learn,
the KGB had been beguiled, like so many others, into thinking that
Scotland Yard was incorruptible. It had never occurred to them that there
was an opportunity here to be exploited, and that the Metropolitan Police

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was just as vulnerable to penetration as any other branch of the British
establishment. I simply told the truth about London’s CID, and the KGB
soon came to realise the accuracy of my dossier on corruption, especially
when Detective Sergeant Nobby Pilcher went down for four years in
October 1973, and two of his detective constables had received eighteen
months. We had been at training school together, and had both served at
Bow Street, and Nobby had featured in my dossier, written long before he
had faced any charges. Put bluntly, the police could be bought as easily
as anyone else, and probably with rather less of an investment. Nor were
these few prosecutions an indication of the willingness of the Yard to
clean the Augean stables. In reality the Met had wanted to perpetuate the
myth of the single bad apple, and pretend that an isolated case of
corruption had been rooted out and eliminated, with the implication that
Nobby’s example had no wider implications for the rest of the force.
There was a logic in this, for the alternative meant getting rid of most of
the Met’s three thousand detectives and starting again, which would be
hard, if not impossible to contemplate. My view was that once an officer
had taken the smallest bung, perhaps from a Covent Garden street porter,
he would take a bribe from almost anyone, which left the system wide
open to exploitation by the KGB if it moved fast enough. However, as I
was to learn from Nick, I had rather overwhelmed the KGB’s analysts,
and had provided them with far too many personalities to study and too
much information to absorb. There had been no argument with my
general interpretation, but I had been so productive that I had choked the
system, and it had been unable to process all my material, let alone
recommend particular courses of action. The impact of my dossier had
been such that a team of specialists were to be gathered to consider the
matter further.

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 On the day after the dinner I had another unusual experience. Nick
turned up without warning to take me out to lunch, and accompanied me
to a restaurant that appeared to be closed. He spoke a few magic words
for us to get in, but after we had ordered some food he left me quite
alone. There was just one other person in the restaurant, sitting diagonally
opposite me, wearing distinctive glasses, who looked vaguely familiar.
He turned and addressed me in quite good English, saying “that was a
very good you did over Brandt”. I made some non-committal reply and
thanked him for the compliment, but he did not introduce himself, and
soon afterwards wiped his mouth with his napkin and left. When Nick
turned up I asked him about the stranger who, I remarked, looked a little
like his boss Yuri Andropov, and he replied with a smile “that was the
Chairman”. So now I had been congratulated by the head of the KGB, the
man who in 1982 would succeed Brezhnev as General-Secretary of the
Communist Party.

Over the next few days I was debriefed by Nick and other KGB
officers who wanted to hear about my adventures in Dar-es-Salaam, and
were also keen to learn my view on particular personalities in London.
This went far beyond my knowledge of corruption at the Yard, and
included brief personality profiles of numerous other people, including
MPs, whose names had been mentioned to me by members of the Dirty
Squad. I was, at the time, quite bitter about how the establishment had
worked against me, so I was quite strident in my opinions, although I
doubt I compromised any single individual to the extent that they might
have become a target for blackmail. It was just that the KGB, isolated in
Moscow and heavily reliant on the limited reporting from the rezidentura
in London, wanted to know how the country worked, and I was happy to
give my somewhat jaundiced perspective. As well as getting this off my

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chest, I was enjoying the attention, which included an entire new
wardrobe. I had arrived in Moscow with very little, so I was escorted to
the hard currency shops to buy suits, ties, sports trousers, shoes and a fur-
lined leather coat. I was not only licensed to kill, I was now dressed to
kill!

Doubtless the psychologists would claim that I was a classic case

of an attention-seeker, craving approval and approbation, but more likely
the KGB recognised that all I needed was for my material needs to be
taken care of, and to be treated with a degree of respect, or certainly the
decency that I had not found in the Met. Flatter me, and I’m yours. Tell
me you’re going to make my wildest dreams come true and I’ll do your
bidding. Treat me like an idiot and I’ll bring the entire house down,
myself along with it. Of course Marcel and Gold Tooth had probably
submitted a psychological profile on me before I ever reached Moscow,
as the Russians are keen on learning about what makes their sources tick,
but now I was available for close-up scrutiny and could be examined as
closely as any laboratory guinea-pig. Was I who I claimed to be? Could I
still be working for a British secret service? Did I have what it takes to be
a good spy or an outstanding lover? I knew that the KGB’s psychiatrists
were thorough, and how much weight they attached to the underlying
character and motivation of their agents. I was to learn that in the so-
called ‘golden age’ of the legendary illegals in the pre-war era. The very
best recruitments had been accomplished by Arnold Deutsch, once the
NKVD illegal rezident in London who had successfully pitched Kim
Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. His true profession? He had
been a Vienna-trained psychologist who had worked under academic
cover at London University. The very first task he had set each of his
agents was to prepare a lengthy autobiography, disclosing their inner-

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most secret feelings and desires, which he had adapted into a
psychological profile. It had been by adopting such methods that the
Soviets had achieved such impressive results by penetrating the west’s
most secret establishments.

My adherence to the KGB seemed entirely natural, at least to me. I

was joining a new firm, gaining my colours, my wings, my whistle and
mt arm-band, but this was not school, the army of the police. Hitherto I
had been a half-hearted part-timer, a useful one-day-a-week fellow
claiming expenses and medical aid, but now I was becoming known, had
gained the trust of the KGB and was to be trained. The KGB itself was
transforming from an exploitive, opportunistic manipulator into a
considerate, even caring corporate employer, apparently concerned about
career paths.
.
It was while I was still living in the suite in the Hotel Rossiya that I
was introduced to General Oleg Kalugin who took me out to a splendid
lunch in an oak-panelled private room above the Arbat restaurant. This
was my first encounter with Kalugin proved to be a turning-point in my
espionage career, for he was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan First Chief
Directorate (FCD) operator who had spent a decade in the United States,
first as a Fulbright Scholar studying journalism at Columbia University,
and then as press attaché in the Soviet embassy in Moscow. Kalugin was
the consummate professional who had handled some of the KGB’s best
sources in America, and in February 1970 had returned to Moscow to be
deputy chief of foreign counter-intelligence. His reputation was based on
his role as case officer, over three years, for Chief Warrant Officer John
A. Walker, a US Navy specialist assigned to the Atlantic Fleet’s
submarine force headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. As a watch officer in

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the message centre Walker possessed a top secret clearance and enjoyed
access to huge quantities of cryptographic material, which in December
1967 he had started to sell to the KGB following a ‘walk-in’ visit to the
Soviet embassy in Washington DC. Walker had been interviewed by a
KGB security officer, Yakov Lukasevics, and Kalugin’s rezident, Boris
Solomatin for two hours, and both had consulted Kalugin, the ‘Line PR’
political intelligence chief who had been impressed by a key-card for the
KL-47 cipher machine that Walker had offered them for $1,000.
Convinced that Walker was an authentic source, Kalugin had supervised
the entire case until his return to Moscow in triumph.

Until his arrest in 1985 John Walker headed the most successful
Soviet spy-ring ever to operate in the United States, and after his
retirement from the US Navy had recruited his brother and son to
maintain the supply of classified material. The breach of security was so
great that the Soviets were estimated to have read more than a million of
the US Navy’s most secret messages, and jeopardised the exact location
of the entire submarine fleet. The person who received much of the credit
for this ongoing intelligence bonanza was Oleg Kalugin, who returned to
Moscow a hero, although only the Chairman, Yuri Andropov, and a few
of the most senior KGB officers knew the details of his coup or why he
had been decorated with the coveted Order of the Red Star. As if his
handling had not been sufficient proof of Kalugin’s skills, he had also run
a source inside the National Security Agency, the very same Robert Lipka
who was, years later, to be betrayed by the Soviet defector Vasili
Mitrokhin.

With the rank of lieutenant-colonel and subordinate only to the

FCD Chief Aleksandr Sakharovsky, Kalugin had embarked on a project

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that really had very little prospect of success, but had been inspired by the
embarrassing defection of Oleg Lyalin in London. A KGB post-mortem
had established that Lyalin had manifested plenty of signs of unreliability
before his defection, and both the rezident and his counter-intelligence
adviser had been negligent, covering up for Lyalin when he had been
discovered to have been conducting affairs with the wives of his
colleagues. Kalugin’s solution, as he had suggested to Valery Boyarov of
the KGB’s counter-intelligence branch, had been to attract some western
defectors to Moscow, but a little research had revealed that the few who
had come to live in the Soviet Union were far from favoured citizens.
Perhaps the most famous of all had been Kim Philby, then living in
alcoholic isolation and in miserable circumstances at his tiny flat. Kalugin
had been determined to befriend Philby and transform his circumstances,
and at about the same moment I had turned up, not exactly a defector, but
certainly someone with a detailed knowledge of life in London, and with
plenty of contacts. We both hit it off together, and became firm friends,
perhaps because I had rather more to offer in current operational terms
than either Philby or his fellow Cambridge conspirator, Donald Maclean,
who was then in poor health, suffering from kidney failure, with whom he
was at daggers drawn because Melinda Maclean had run off with Philby.
Maclean was then working for a foreign policy institute and really had
very little to do with the KGB, whereas Philby had been cultivated by
Kalugin as he was a very poor advertisement for defection to Moscow.
All the stories about Philby holding the rank of general and going to work
at the KGB’s headquarters were complete bunkum, and the truth was that
he sat at home in an alcoholic, occasionally suicidal stupor, trying to tune
his radio to the BBC World Service. Until Kalugin had decided to exploit
his undoubted talents, Philby had been a wasting asset, but the reality he
had been completely out of touch with life in the west since he fled from

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Beirut in January 1963. Indeed, he had not really lived in London since
1956, when he moved to the Lebanon, so he was actually about twenty
years out of date in terms of what he could offer the KGB about life in
London.

Apart from George Blake, who had escaped from Wormwood

Scrubs in 1966, having been imprisoned in 1961, the English defector
community in Moscow was pretty thin on the ground, and really
represented a burden to the KGB, and definitely not regarded as an asset.
A former Met detective, on the other hand, knew his way around London
as none of the others could ever hope to. Evidently Kalugin realised my
potential, and it was not long before there was a clear purpose behind the
KGB’s cultivation and flattery. From the gossip I was privy to, I was
aware that I was associating with one of Dzerzhinsky Square’s few real
stars. Aged forty, Kalugin had been promoted to be the organisation’s
youngest general in 1974, and headed Directorate K, a self-contained,
elite branch within the FCD that employed some seven hundred officers,
divided into eight departments, the first of which was dedicated to
penetrating the CIA. In a departure from the KGB orthodoxy, Kalugin
had been authorised to adopt aggressive, counter-intelligence tactics to
mount hostile operations against the KGB, using separate, dedicated
reporting channels isolated from the usual FCD traffic, and therefore
immune from betrayal, for the sole purpose of attracting and retaining
spies of Kim Philby’s quality. It was this effective strategy that enabled
the KGB’s Rem Krasilnikov, of the Second Chief Directorate, to exploit
the leads to spies offered by Ames and Hanssen, without alerting the
Americans. One of Kalugin’s successors in the Washington DC
rezidentura was to be Viktor Cherkashin, a counter-intelligence specialist
who, a little later, became the beneficiary of the windfall from these two

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self-recruited spies, one in the CIA, the other in the FBI. Once this
information reached Moscow it was to be handled by Krassilnikov who,
when I was in Moscow, had been chief of the SCD’s Second (British)
Department before he had been transferred to run the First (North
American) Department. Krassilnikov’s task was to identify and neutralise
the spies incriminated by Cherkashin without compromising his two
valued sources.

In the years that followed, I was to become one of Kalugin's main

agents, deployed against the unsuspecting wives of CIA personnel.
Naturally I was never told exactly what Kalugin knew about me, but it
was common-sense that as a counter-intelligence expert he must have
wondered about where my allegiances lay, and whether I had been
planted onto the KGB by SIS. He had certainly read the account I had
written of my experiences in London, and the circumstances in which I
had been obliged to start a new life in Africa, but he must have wondered
about some of the inconsistencies. Why, he once asked me, if I was on
the run from the police, had I been able to maintain contact with Bill
Moody? It was a fair question, and it was quite hard to persuade an
outsider with no knowledge of the hideous events then still unfolding in
London, that although Moody had been the senior officer on the
investigation team, he himself had much to lose if I had turned up and
told all I knew about what he and his colleagues at the Yard had been up
to for years. Kalugin told me that he had been astonished by my
revelations of institutionalised corruption at every level of Scotland Yard,
but his uneducated viewpoint, whilst widely shared, had been completely
unrealistic and owed more to television propaganda than fact. It was true,
historically, that the Met’s CID possessed far more technical and forensic
resources than the county forces, especially before the amalgamation of

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the smaller provincial constabularies, and that the Murder Squad was
often called in by inexperienced detectives to solve difficult crimes.
These events enhanced the Yard’s reputation and made New Scotland
Yard a building universally recognised, even if the Commissioner’s
Office had long since moved to its present home, the bleak, soulless
office block half a mile away in Victoria.

I had to explain to Kalugin that there were two sides to the Yard.
One was seen by the public, which expected and generally received fair
treatment from arguably the best police force in the world. The other
perspective was that of the underworld, and a handful of bent lawyers,
who understood that the CID kept professional criminals under control by
the use of informants. Those sources came from the criminal fraternity
and occasionally unorthodox methods had to be used to make a
recruitment or ensure a conviction. Innocent members of the public had
nothing to fear from such tactics because they were only applied against
known villains, Moody, of course, had branched out on his own, with
Wally Virgo, to make a business out of their duties and, as I saw it, I had
been caught in the middle. The CID had almost nothing whatever to do
with the intelligence services, and my continuing link with Harley, after
my arrival in North Africa, was simply a matter of self-preservation, not
evidence of any SIS operation. As I was to hear later, my connection with
Harley had been discovered by the KGB in Rabat after a search had been
made of my motor caravan which had revealed several letters from
Harley, letting me know what was happening in London. After all, I had
detailed in my original account how Harley had given me money to keep
me in Morocco, and I would hardly have mentioned that if there was any
sinister interpretation to it. Kalugin appeared to accept my assurances,
which were on the level, and the issue was never raised again, probably

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because his cryptographic experts had failed to detect any signs of a
hidden code. Doubtless the rezidentura in London had been asked to keep
Moscow informed of developments in the much publicised clean-out at
the Yard, and the KGB must have known quite enough about SIS’s
operations to know that not even the most imaginative Wykehamist could
have dreamed up such an elaborate scenario simply in the hope of
ingratiating me with their opponents. Kalugin accepted me as a Met
officer on the run, without any intelligence ties, and he was right to do so
because that was precisely what I was. Indeed, initially he had considered
sending me back to London to make contact with possible sources inside
the police, but he soon changed his mind when I pointed out the flaws in
such a plan. As it turned out, he had plenty of other ideas for me. In any
event, he had been tremendously impressed by the way the information in
my dossier turned out to be all too dreadfully true.

My initiation into the KGB followed a long holiday with Nick in

the Soviet Union, to Leningrad, Armenia, Azerbaijan and a tour of
Eastern Bloc countries, all paid for by my new employers who entirely
understood the one condition I had imposed on our new relationship: I
would be happy to work for them, but would not act against British
targets or against British interests. Clearly, from the number of lengthy
interviews I attended and the training I was given, the KGB had other
ideas, and I underwent a course of seduction techniques provided by
some very experienced women who clearly knew what they were talking
about.

At that time I had never heard of a ‘Romeo spy’, and nor had many
others, but evidently this was the mission that had been chosen for me.
The leading exponent of this rather specialised field of espionage,

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involving the world’s two oldest professions and somewhat akin to a
male Mata Hari, was Markus Wolf, and he had successfully penetrated
Konrad Adenauer’s chancellery with an agent codenamed FELIX who
pretended to be a sales representative marketing beauty products to
hairdressers, and had seduced NORMA, one of the Chancellor’s less
attractive secretaries. Their relationship had lasted for years until the BfV
had started to take an interest in FELIX and he had been withdrawn to
safety in East Berlin. Typically, Wolf had been able to exploit the
situation by learning from FELIX of another potentially vulnerable
secretary who worked for Hans Globke, Adenauer’s Secretary of State.
She was promptly targeted by Wolf’s star Romeo, Hans Stöhler, and
proved to be an excellent source, to the point that she was herself
recruited as a spy and codenamed GUDRUN. She had continued to
supply valuable information until Stöhler, a former Luftwaffe pilot whose
cover was that of an estate agent, fell ill and was brought home to die.
After his death GUDRUN, who thought she had been working for the
KGB, gave up espionage, perhaps proving that she had been truly smitten
by Stöhler and had only really spied for him. In this case Stöhler had
pretended to be Russian, but Wolf often recruited under a ‘false flag’
which was a demanding role for any handler, and one relatively
susceptible to discovery where someone masqueraded as a national of a
foreign country. Ideally the HVA needed to deploy authentic, suitable
foreigners to play such parts, but they were a commodity in short supply
in the GDR.

Wolf’s skill at exploiting the vulnerabilities of women earned him

a unique reputation, especially as his agents worked for love, not money,
although when I was in Moscow only the KGB knew the full extent of the
HVA’s operations. He recruited Gabrielle Gast, a BND analyst who had

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fallen for Karl-Heinz Schneider while she had been completing her
doctorate in Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1968. Under his guidance she had
applied for a job with the BND at its headquarters in Pullach and by 1987
was deputy chief of the BND’s Soviet Bloc political branch, and a
dedicated covert to Communism. Three years later she was betrayed by a
senior HVA officer anxious to ingratiate himself with the Federal
Republic, who knew only that Wolf had been running a woman inside the
BND for years, and she had adopted a handicapped child, but this was
enough for the BfV to identify Gast and she was imprisoned.

While I was in Moscow Wolf was also handling Dagmar Kahlig-

Scheffler, a twenty-seven year-old blonde divorcee and another of
Stöhler’s conquests who in December 1975 had gone to work in
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s private office, but was caught a couple of
years later when her HVA controller, Peter Goslar, came under BfV
surveillance. Goslar’s home had been searched and among the papers
found had been Schmidt’s notes of a conversation with James Callaghan
about his recent discussions with President Jimmy Carter. Goslar was
then watched as he collected more information from Dagmar and, under
interrogation, she revealed she had fallen for Stöhler while on holiday in
Bulgaria with her seven year-old daughter, and she was sentenced to four
years and five months’ imprisonment for espionage. It later emerged that
Wolf had gone to considerable lengths to encourage the agent he knew by
the codename INGE, even to the point of arranging a ‘Potemkin wedding’
for her. She believed that her marriage in East Berlin to Stöhler had been
valid, but in fact the entire ceremony had been staged by the HVA,
complete with a bogus pastor. Her commitment to Stöhler, whom she had
known as Herbert Richter, was so complete that she had even agreed to

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send her daughter to a boarding school in Switzerland so she could devote
more time to him, and to espionage.

Kahlig-Scheffler always knew that her lover was an East German,

although she thought he was an engineer and not an HVA officer,
whereas Helge Berger, a buxom secretary in the Foreign Ministry,
believed that the handsome ‘Peter Krause’ she met in Bonn in 1966 was a
South African working for the British SIS. This was a classic false flag
operation, complete with a senior ‘British’ officer who flew in to
Frankfurt to debrief her. Actually, he was a former Wehrmacht prisoner
of war who spoke very fluent English and persuaded her to supply her
boyfriend with thousands of copies of classified documents over the next
six years until she was arrested and sentenced to four and a half years’
imprisonment.

Wolf’s best false flag operator was Roland Gandt who persuaded a
German secretary at SHAPE, at Fontainbleau, that he was a Danish
intelligence officer operating in France under journalistic cover.
Accepting that Roland was a national of another NATO country,
Margerete fell for him in Vienna but, as a devout Roman Catholic,
insisted that she should confess her espionage to a priest. Ever the master
of improvisation, Wolf had arranged for a bogus priest to hear her
confession at a remote Jutland church, and give her an equally worthless
absolution.

The false flag was a flexible technique which could be tailored to

suit any individual target, and depended largely on the skill of the Romeo.
In the example of Dietmar Schumacher, another of Wolf’s stars, he had
kept up the pretence of being a peace activist named Olaf for the twelve

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years of his relationship with an English secretary, Helen Anderson.
Codenamed MARY, she had been persuaded by her lover to stay in
Germany and obtain a job at a US Army base in West Berlin where she
stole classified NATO documents for him. She was only arrested in
March 1992 when Schumacher’s HVA controller, Karl-Henz Michalek,
confessed, compromising Schumacher who was revealed as a man with a
wife, Margarite, in East Germany, and a son. Because Anderson was able
to demonstrate that she had no idea her lover had been a Communist spy,
she was sentenced to just two weeks’ community service before she
settled down in Arbroath, while Schumacher received a suspended prison
term of twelve months.

Another of Wolf’s Romeos, Herbert Schöter, started an affair with

Gerda Osterreider, a slender nineteen year-old student who was on a
languages course at the Alliance Francaise in Paris. When she returned to
Bonn in 1966 she got a job as a cipher clerk in the Foreign Office and
gave her lover the original teletype tape on which incoming diplomatic
telegrams were printed. Five years later she was posted to Warsaw where,
in Schöter’s absence, she had taken up with a German journalist to whom
she had confessed her espionage, and when he reported her she was
sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.

Like Berger, some of these agents were appalled to discover how

they had been duped, while others remained loyal, and in these
circumstances Wolf sometimes managed to obtain their early release in a
spy-swap. This happened to Renate Lutze, a secretary in the Ministry of
Defence who married her Romeo, Lothar, in September 1972, and was
arrested with him at their Bonn apartment in June 1976. She was

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sentenced to six years, he to twelve, but later they were freed in an
exchange negotiated by Wolf.

The women who spied for the HVA seem to have been motivated
primarily by their almost blind devotion to their lovers, a common
denominator that Wolf perceived as more important than ideology or
nationality. At the time, few appreciated the potential of the Romeo, and
it was only when the HVA’s archives fell into western hands, and Rainer
Rupp was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, that the scale of the
operation was fully grasped. Rupp’s English wife Ann, codenamed
TURQUOISE, had worked at NATO’s headquarters and had willingly
spied for her HVA husband, whose name had appeared in a file marked
TOPAZ. She received a twenty-two month suspended prison sentence in
1994. Wolf’s other agents included Ingrid Garbe, a member of the FRG’s
mission at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels; Ursel Lorenzen, who
worked in NATO’s general secretariat; Imelda Verrept, a Belgian
secretary in NATO; Inge Goliach, who had penetrated the CDU; Christel
Broszey, secretary to the CDU’s deputy leader Kurt Biedenkopf; Helga
Rödiger, a secretary in the FRG’s Ministry of Finance; and Ursula Höfs, a
secretary in the CDP. All these agents had been persuaded to spy by their
Romeo lovers, but the BfV failed to grasp Wolf’s strategy until 1979
when the new BfV president, Dr Richard Meier, belatedly introduced a
new vetting procedure, codenamed Operation REGISTRATION, to
screen the partners of single women holding sensitive posts. This
innovation precipitated the hasty withdrawal of several agents and their
lovers, but the principle had been well established. Given the right
circumstances, a well-groomed, presentable man could achieve access to
important secrets using vulnerable women as surrogates. Wolf had proved
the strategy was effective, and the KGB had been looking for suitable

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candidates when I had turned up. As it was explained to me by Nick, I
was not to develop any long-term relationships with my target women,
but rather was to act as a reconnaissance, soften them up for others,
making the initial approach to see if they would be compliant. After I had
bedded them and established the extent of their access to information of
interest to the KGB, I was to move on. According to Nick, there was no
shortage of suitable candidates waiting for my attention.

My encounters with Nina had demonstrated that I was quite

inexperienced sexually, and had little idea of any sophisticated technique,
and even less of foreplay, so the KGB had decided to rectify the situation.
A blonde, good-looking tour guide, whom I met casually in the hotel bar,
offered to take me to the famous Moscow Zoo and soon Katinka and I
were going everywhere on the metro, visiting all the city’s famous tourist
attractions. She was a typical Russian, blonde with soft, velvet blue eyes,
beautiful high cheek-bones, good body and reasonable English. She had
what you might call English skin, clear and transparent like alabaster,
wonderful to the touch. Her rosy cheeks blushed naturally and she had the
look of those long-legged peasant girls, originally of German extraction,
from the area around the Volga.

Katinka eventually came to my room after dinner, and on our

second night together she began to give me some guidance on bedroom
manners, as though our first night together had been some kind of
assessment. Actually, this was precisely what it had been, although I
gained the impression, from a couple of remarks she made, that she had
seen my performance with Nina. This could only have happened if our
trysts had been filmed, and therefore served to confirm my suspicion that

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the hotel room we had shared in Berlin had been wired for vision as well
as sound.

My orthodox, repressed approach to sex, which in my youth had

consisted of fumbles behind the rugby club, had never extended to oral
sex, and my new teacher revealed to me that there should be much more
to love-making than jumping on a woman and reaching a climax as
quickly as possible. Over the next few days, after I had attended
numerous lectures on secret writing, communications and other
tradecraft, she took me in hand in my hotel bedroom and gave me a very
practical grasp of how to bring a woman to orgasm, and help her
experience multiple climaxes. She was so skilful that it took me some
time to realize that she was a KGB officer, and was undertaking an
assignment to improve my performance, albeit with obvious enthusiasm.
She regarded sex as an art, and educated me to understand and appreciate
the very physical needs of women. Her subtlety and tact were so
considerate that I did not instantly appreciate that no foreigner could
entertain a Soviet in his hotel room without the consent, if not the active
planning of my KGB friends. Such contacts were strictly forbidden and
there were hotel employees on every floor ensure the rules were obeyed.
By definition, throughout the Cold War, any visit to a floor reserved to
foreign visitors by a local Russian had to have been authorised by the
KGB.

On our first night together we had enjoyed our lovemaking and

Katinka had appeared entirely satisfied with my performance, although in
retrospect I now realise I had made very little effort at foreplay, for on
our second night she had asked me whether there was a fire in the
building. What’s the hurry? Why rush? She started to take control and,

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while I found this mildly disconcerting, but recalled the doggerel version
of the advice given to Prince Albert before he bedded Victoria: ‘Don’t
diddle without a fiddle, fiddle before you diddle, and the more you fiddle
the better you diddle’.

Once I had begun intercourse Katinka again urged me to go slowly

and not rush to a climax, and at one point when I had reached a gallop she
gave my penis a small pinch which had the effect she desired without
losing my erection. Coitus could be extended, she insisted, if I made the
mental application and diverted your thoughts briefly.

On our third and fourth nights I was performing to Katinka’s

exacting standards, on night four bring her to a genuine climax, and
thereby learned how to recognise the genuine article, in contrast to the
fake variety so often play-acted by women. On the fifth night

Prior to my encounter with Katinka my attitude to love-making had

been very pedestrian and, as I was to soon acknowledge, completely
selfish. I learned that it was really a matter of good manners to ensure that
one’s partner should have at least one orgasm before the man gains his. I
also came to realise that there are many different ways of bringing a
woman to a climax, as they are all quite different, but if one does not
have time for lengthy experimentation the solution is to create the right
atmosphere, and then exercise one’s skills at cunnilingus. Quite simply,
very few women can resist a gentle massage of their clitoris by a man’s
tongue. Getting to that stage, however, is also a matter of technique.

Under Katinka’s tuition I developed what can only be described as

an art of seduction, which at the outset involved mild flirtation, a lot of

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eye contact and a few gentle hand squeezes. This was then followed by a
very casual kiss on any area of open skin. Katinka explained about the
sensitivity of women’s arms, so that even a gentle, lingering brush of
one’s lips across a forearm, when the opportunity arose, could set the
hormones rushing. I had been more used to a rushed fumble behind the
bushes and a struggle with a bra strap, but I was made to see that the
unthreatening gradual approach was far more stimulating to a woman. It
turned out that although hitherto I had not fully appreciated the
advantages of Katinka’s strategy, it made sense and was complemented
by some of my natural instincts. I had been taught from an early age to
get to my feet whenever a lady entered the room, and my instinctive use
of drawing-room manners always made a favourable impression,
especially in foreign women who tend to notice men holding doors open
for them, or inviting ladies to walk through a doorway first. Even my
service in the Metropolitan Police had not erased my memory of the good
manners required in the officers’ mess, and I was able to play on
expectations of how a gentleman should behave.

I suppose I had been too busy, embarrassed or inhibited to read the

Kama Sutra, Masters & Johnson, or any of the literature on sexual
behaviour, but Katinka gave me a wonderful course on the female
anatomy and what are now referred to rather clinically as erogenous
zones, starting with the ears, neck and then the rest of the body. Under
her guidance I learned that there was indeed such a phenomenon as a
nipple orgasm, and that many women can be brought to experience a
special kind of climax simply by gentle manipulation and sucking of an
erect nipple. Of course, this does not occur in all women, and I had
noticed, for example, that African women had very little feeling in their
nipples. On the other hand, others can only reach a climax with the help

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of continuous, sometimes not so gentle nipple-pinching, as I was to
discover within a year when I was in South Africa, hitting on a thirty-
something American librarian in a cultural centre sponsored by the
Agency for International Development. She had demanded some rough
treatment to her nipples and had turned up at my hotel the following day,
with quite bruised nipples, to have them massaged and caressed back to
their usual sensitivity. This had not been my idea of giving, or receiving
pleasure or sexual gratification, but I made the sacrifice. Everything I had
been told by my truly gifted instructor turned out to be true, including the
more esoteric information that at the time I rather thought she had made
up.

All the breast is hyper-sensitive to touch, and women love a

gradual, zig-zag manoeuvre before the tongue finally finds its objective.
Combined with a whispered admiration for her breast, this tactic
eliminates any apprehension and creates confidence. One way to prevent
a woman from achieving an orgasm is to undermine her confidence as the
process is as much mental as it is physical. Women spend a long time
wondering about their own breasts, and comparing them to those of their
friends, so a few murmured words of admiration go a long way. I soon
came to believe that with a little encouragement most women are very
keen to show off their bodies and play to an appreciative audience. My
sole task, at the initial stage, as Katinka explained, was to instil that
confidence in my partner and gain their trust. All women have different
special erogenous zones, and in the right circumstances they are usually
willing to confide what really turns them on, although shyness and social
inhibitions often prevent this vital information from being communicated.
These are her secret points, usually only discussed in women’s

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magazines, but often imparted to Muslim men, especially in Pakistan, at
an early age.

On the issue of oral sex, I was a complete novice, and truthfully I

really had not had any experience of going down on a woman. According
to Katinka, this was the really crucial dimension to love-making. Also,
much the same tactics were required as before. The slow, diversionary
kisses of the tummy and inner thighs, gradually licking and kissing one’s
way up to one partner’s knickers. More tantalising and teasing should
follow before finally, almost imperceptibly, pulling the gusset aside and
letting one’s tongue caress the rim of the labia, scarcely touching it, while
simultaneously working at a nipple with one’s thumb and forefinger.

The really delicate part of my training concerned the manipulation

of the clitoris, that mysterious part of the female anatomy about which I
had been completely ignorant until Katinka’s expert tuition. It may be
that some women have a ‘G-spot’ in the wall of their vagina, but there is
no guarantee that ordinary intercourse will either stimulate it or even have
any impact on it at all. However, there can be no doubting the powerful
effect of a tongue flickering over and around the clitoris. Just a few
moments of this treatment will cause the lips of the labia swell, and this is
a good moment to probe the vagina itself, either with a finger or a tongue.
Within a minute the attention should return to the now extremely
sensitive area around the clitoris, and a rhythmic circular motion of the
tongue will start the little tremors or vibrations that suggest a climax is
close. The final push over the end can be achieved either by a very gentle
introduction of a tooth, or the tongue just faintly touching the tip of the
now extended clit.

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 A clitoral orgasm brought on by gentle cunnilingus has an effect
that lasts for several seconds and doubtless there is an elaborate medical
explanation for the physiological changes that occur as the tension and
pheronomes are released, but some moments of quiet, with some kissing
to the breast and neck will have a definite psychological effect, and the
whole experience will change the nature of the relationship. After the first
couple of orgasms more experimentation will establish particular
preferences, and some women adore their entire external genitalia to be
taken into a man’s mouth and gently manipulated. Others prefer a gentle
bite as the climax approaches, but everyone has their own favourite, and
the secret is to induce a state of ecstasy where usual inhibitions are
abandoned. I learned that many women never experience an orgasm from
a man, but those that do can develop a physical, as well as a mental
dependence on their partner, which is the moment when the Romeo spy
can make his needs known.

The climax itself is, for a woman, a moment of great significance

because something is happening within almost ever fibre of the body over
which they have almost no control. She has reached an erotic state where
she is on the point of giving up her entire self, ready for takeover. You,
the man, is the person supervising this phenomenon, and thus the man
acquires considerable influence, if not mental power. The man has taken
a position of importance in his partner’s emotional life, and having
delivered her to a place of complete satisfaction, she is very likely to want
to repeat the experience, and it was to be my task to exploit their minds
too. Under Katinka’s gentle tutelage I felt as though I had been
transformed into a 200mph sports car, cruising in a 30mph limit, and I
was anxious to put my training to the test.

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 When I returned to Moscow after a visit to Leningrad I
encountered a second teacher, a olive-skinned, black-eyed oriental beauty
from Kazakhstan in Soviet central Asia with body curves that would have
inspired Rodin. We met casually, and in retrospect I suspect she was
probably a professional because she took a cool, detached businesslike
approach to our relationship and taught me some interesting new
techniques, including one using hot wax, which I never found an
opportunity to use in the field, and another using ice cubes. A veritable
encyclopaedia of sex, she had explained about the necessity od mastering
the urgencies of one’s own body and how to apply heat and cold to the
sex organs. First of all she dampened my ardour by preparing a kind of
ice poultice, of crushed ice wrapped in a towel, and doused me with it,
then using her mouth and tongue over the area that had been so cold. The
difference in temperature proved astonishingly exciting, especially when
she repeated the exercise, and I did the same to her. Taking really
sensitive parts of the body from below freezing to 98.4 degrees has
tremendous erotic potential, and is entirely risk free. She also showed me
how to apply ice to her nipples, then moving my lips to them, causing
them to spring up stiff and instantly erect. Forever afterwards, whenever a
woman has asked a waiter for more ice, I have had to suppress my
amusement, but have occasionally allowed my giggles to be an
opportunity to explain my mirth and indulge in a little flirtation.

Her other pleasure, in anal sex, she claimed was shared by fifty
percent of women, and at her insistence I obliged her frequently, although
I was hesitant to do so, accepting that this was another sacrifice I would
have to make to please the KGB. My Kazakhstani teacher also introduced
me to bondage, telling me that many women, herself included, gained
huge pleasure from being restrained, either lightly with their hands tied

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loosely, or manacled with chains as though they had been enslaved. I
was never particularly enthralled with this fetish, but I took the view that
if the KGB wanted to send me across the world at their expense, the lady
being bedded was entitled to whatever she wanted, and it was my
responsibility to satisfy her needs. It was essential, my tutor explained,
that the ties or rope around a woman’s wrists must always be sufficiently
loose to allow her to slip of them should she feel the need to do so. She
also revealed that many women will already have scarves or restraining
devices handy, and in the middle of love-making may call out ‘top
drawer’, to indicate where they are kept. In such circumstances I should
express no surprise, but take it all in my stride. Her final piece of advice
was to avoid being tied up myself in case ‘Yankee bandits’ burst through
the door when I was bound to the bedposts!

I only lasted a couple of weeks with my new teacher, by which

time she had judged me proficient. Either that, or I was enjoying my work
too much! The final test had been an earth-shattering, simultaneous
clitoral and vaginal orgasm which had engulfed my teacher.
“Fascinating” I had remarked, feigning detachment. “Thank you, darlink”
she had replied. Goodness knows where she had learned her trade but
Miss Kazakhstan certainly knew how to put it to good use and even
inducted me into masochism and the joys of hot candle wax, inflicting
just enough pain to heighten one’s pleasure, but leaving no permanent
skin damage. I never had to use this technique on my targets, and on the
couple of occasions I lit a candle thinking a woman might like it, I found
she would go all gooey and romantic instead!

During the day I was given training by a KGB retiree, introduced

to me as ARTHUR, whom I met in a safe-house near the KGB

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headquarters at Yasenevo. He told me that he had operated in the United
States, and when he mentioned he had been arrested and exchanged in a
spy-swap, I thought perhaps he might have been the legendary Rudolf
Abel, but in fact he had died in 1971, so his precise identity remains a
mystery to me. Whoever he was, he looked a little like my grandfather,
albeit without his broken nose, being short and bald. He spoke perfect
English with a slight American accent and I recall that he said he came
from the city that had been the capital of Russia before Ivan the Terrible.
I recall that he put particular emphasis on the use of hats, claiming that
witnesses always remember a trilby or a straw hat, rather than the person
wearing it. He was enthusiastic about disguises, advocating the use of
false beards and moustaches, and the application of skin darkeners. He
also recommended wearing glasses and scarves which could be discarded
on a train so one’s appearance is completely altered by the time one
alights, and gave other tips on how to elude clandestine surveillance.
Such counter-surveillance measures are all tricks of the trade, and
ARTHUR knew them all.

The use of aliases and cover names, even among members of the
same organisation, while odd to the outsider, is standard practice within
almost all intelligence communities, and is intended to protect the
professionals when they undertake assignments abroad. Similarly, their
reports will be sourced to a codename, almost certainly unknown to the
person involved, and this measure is also designed to avoid
compromising the individual concerned. Accordingly, it took me some
time to learn that ‘Nick’s’ real first-name was Viktor, and that I appeared
in the KGB’s files as SCOT. Such matters are entirely routine for
insiders, but I only grasped the implications after weeks of indoctrination
and training.

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 As well as training me to satisfy women, I underwent an intensive
course on surveillance and counter-surveillance techniques, and we
practised in the streets of Moscow but, whenever I was sure I had shaken
off my tail, someone unexpectedly touched my shoulder to show they still
had me in sight. I never saw more than half a dozen of my opponents, but
the KGB must have deployed far more.

At that stage, of course, I had never heard the expressions ‘Romeo

spy’ or ‘Red Casanova’, and it would be some years before such tabloid
terms came into my vocabulary, but it was not long before I realised that
this was what the KGB had in mind for me. Despite my complete naiveté
regarding women, I had always known that I was considered physically
attractive by the opposite sex. This state of affairs had dated back to my
childhood when a neighbour, Mary Potts, had stalked me on my way
home from school, and she had become such a nuisance that I had altered
my route to avoid going past her house, a precaution that was made all
the more difficult because she only lived two doors away, and seemed to
be permanently on the look-out for me. Stalking is the modern term, but it
is entirely appropriate to what I experienced, albeit on a non-threatening
level.

My first practical test was set by the Second Chief Directorate,

having been lent to them by the FCD, which I found to be very generous
employers, always flush with roubles. The difference between the two
branches of the organisation was considerable, with my colleagues in the
FCD being an elite, behaving like gentlemen, and reminding me of my
days as an army officer. In contrast, the Second Chief Directorate was run
by men very reminiscent of some of the thugs I had encountered in the

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Yard’s specialist squads. I soon learned that many of them wanted to join
the FCD and took correspondence language courses to improve their
chances of switching over to the KGB’s most prestigious branch, foreign
intelligence. Like the FCD, the Second Chief Directorate was sub-divided
into geographical branches, with its Second Department covering Britain,
Canada and Australasia. The First Department, of course, was aimed
against ‘the Main Adversary’, the CIA. The division of responsibilities
meant that targets such as John Vassall, compromised by SCD personnel
in Moscow, were handled upon their return home by FCD case officers
attached to the local rezidentura, so it was quite a novelty for SCD
officers to travel abroad. Usually when they did so it was in connection
with a recruitment made in Moscow, or perhaps on temporary duty to
provide security for a delegation overseas. It was on just such an
assignment to Geneva in February 1964 that Yuri Nosenko had defected
to the CIA and revealed the scale of the SCD’s technical operations
against foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow. On that occasion, guided
by Nosenko’s detailed information, US State Department ‘sweepers’ had
found and removed more than sixty listening devices installed in the
fabric of the US Embassy. Nosenko had previously approached the CIA
in Geneva in June 1962, when his lurid tales of homosexual entrapment
in Moscow had convinced his debriefers of his authenticity, and led them
to pass on to MI5 a tip about a British victim of the Second Department
of the SCD who had been blackmailed into espionage, and was quickly
identified as John Vassall.

It was only after I had agreed to help the SCD that I learned from
my new handler, who looked like the boxer Jack Dempsey, of their
interest in the British embassy and its staff. Hitherto I had regarded the
KGB as a gigantic monolith, and had paid no attention to its various sub-

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divisions, but I quickly learned that the SCD ruled Moscow and took a
close interest in all the foreign embassies in the capital. They appeared to
have almost unlimited resources to devote to surveillance, licensed the
hookers who trawled the hotels in search of foreign clients, and even
provided the locally-employed staff who could be found in almost every
diplomatic mission. Every businessman, tourist, diplomat and foreign
student came under the SCD’s scrutiny, and many were selected for
special attention by the KGB’s expert watchers of the Seventh
Directorate. The objective was to identify the professional intelligence
officers engaged in hostile operations, break the commercial or
diplomatic covers of case officers seeking to communicate with their
spies in the capital, and run offensive operations against potentially
profitable targets. These activities ranged from the casual ‘dangle’ where
a Soviet approached a candidate and offered to supply tempting
information, to the elaborate honey traps, using ‘swallows’ or ‘ravens’ to
blackmail the unwary. In the not so recent past I was aware of the case of
Commander Anthony Courtney, a Tory MP who had been filmed in
action, through a two-way mirror in his room in the Ukrainia, with a local
beauty, Zinaida Volkova, his Intourist guide, and then threatened with
exposure if he failed to cooperate, and the wretched John Vassall who
had fallen for a handsome young skier and caught on camera in flagrante
delicto. Whereas Courtney had resisted the rather crude attempt to coerce
him, but had lost his wife and his Harrow East Parliamentary
constituency as a result when some compromising photos were circulated
in London, Vassall had succumbed to the KGB’s pressure and had agreed
to pass his contacts secret documents from the British embassy where he
worked as the naval attaché’s clerk. Indeed, Vassall had proved an
excellent investment for the FCD because he had continued to spy
undetected for the next seven years until his arrest in September 1962.

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The SCD’s methodology was to survey the embassy, spot the SIS station
commander posing as a diplomat, look for a security man from MI5, and
then watch the rest of the staff for any opportunities. To assist in
achieving its objectives the SCD tapped all the phone lines, monitored
any wireless traffic, placed bugs in all the walls, floors and furniture, and
ensured that only its own UPDK personnel were allowed to work as
cleaners, maids, guides, drivers, interpreters, telephonists and
administrative staff. Although supposedly a semi-independent state
agency, the UPDK was a monopoly wholly controlled by the SCD which
selected and vetted its personnel and chose who would work where.
According to one of the rumours I heard, the SCD even ran its own sex
training school at Verkhonoye, near Kazan, for its agents. For many years
the SCD had been headed by the notorious General Oleg Gribanov whose
successes included blackmailing the long-serving French ambassador,
Maurice Dejean, who had been seduced by a KGB ‘swallow’, and his air
attaché, Colonel Louis Guibaud. Stories had circulated in Moscow about
a French diplomat who had been so delighted by the blackmail photos
pictures by the KGB’s hidden cameraman that allegedly he had asked for
extra copies, but in reality Dejean had succumbed to the coercion,
whereas Guibaud eventually had committed suicide. It had been the
defection in London of a KGB co-optee, the playwright Yuti Krotkov, in
September 1963, that had alerted the west to the fact that Vassall’s
experience had not been an isolated incident. He had played a part in the
Dejean affair, introducing the ambassador to his seductress, and
according to him, even Dejean’s beautiful wife had been the victim of a
separate attempt to seduce her. Thus the French embassy had been the
focus of the SCD’s malign attention and, under the new management of
General Grigori F. Grigorenko, the British were about to get more of the
same treatment.

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 As for the British Embassy itself, it was accommodated in an
elegant mansion, owned in Czarist times by a wealthy merchant, on the
Moscow River, overlooking the Kremlin on the opposite bank. The
building itself was an architectural gem, but it was totally unsuited to be
an embassy, apart from its prestigious position. The fabric was poorly
maintained, and was so riddled with bugs that the Foreign Office security
branch had installed a ‘bubble’, a transparent sound-proof box made of
perspex in which sensitive conversations could be held without fear of
being overheard, or intercepted by the kind of sophisticated electronic
eavesdropping devices that the visiting ‘sweepers’ would discover from
time to time. No sooner had a microphone been discovered and removed,
a replacement was installed by one of the many locally-employed UPDK
staff. As for its geographic location, it was an easy target for the KGB
because it was a low structure, dwarfed by other buildings nearby from
which the KGB could monitor its radio traffic. Thus, despite its
wonderful appearance and outlook, the site was, from an espionage
viewpoint, a security disaster. Better still, for the KGB, there was only
one entrance and exit, so all arrivals and departures could be logged
easily.

Quite apart from the success achieved in 1955 with Vassall, the
SCD had entrapped the ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, in 1968, who
had fallen for Galya, his enticingly attractive Russian maid, thoughtfully
supplied by the UPDK. An experienced career diplomat who had served
previously as ambassador in Brazil and Iran, Sir Geoffrey had bedded
Galya in his private apartment while his wife was away and, when he
realised his folly, had been withdrawn hastily to London and replaced
before any pressure had been applied to him. His indiscretion had been

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hushed up, but it had wrecked the end of what otherwise would have been
a faultless career. Far from discouraged by this episode, the SCD’s
Second Department, then headed by Rem Krassilnikov, had completed a
study of the current ambassador, Sir Terence Garvey, and his staff of
forty diplomats, and found what it hoped were a few vulnerabilities.

Krassilnikov had a full head of snow-while hair and looked, as his

nickname of ‘the professor’ suggested, more like a genial academic. He
had learned his trade in the First Chief Directorate, in Canada and Beirut,
and had been responsible for running a mole inside the RCMP Security
service, James Morrison, codenamed FRIEND. Although fired from the
RCMP for fraud, Morrison was the subject of a lengthy molehunt
codenamed LONG KNIFE but, thanks to Krassilnikov’s consummate
skill as a spymaster, was not caught until he made a televised confession
years later. However, Krassilnikov’s advancement within the FCD had
been handicapped by his Jewish parentage, and when he had been denied
a rezidentura of his own he had switched to the SCD where he had been
coached by Philby and Blake on the techniques employed by his British
adversaries. Rem was himself the son of a Soviet intelligence officer, and
his first name was an acronym for the Russian phrase ‘world revolution’.
His devotion to the Party can be judged by the fact that his wife was
named Ninel – ‘Lenin’ spelt backwards! Altogether, Krassilnikov was a
shrewd old bird who knew just what he wanted from the British.

My target, I was informed, was a woman, codenamed VERA, and

my task, in January 1975, was to establish whether VERA was a
genuinely a lonely figure, or whether she had some more sinister role.
One evening she had made a reservation at the Opera, and my
instructions were to approach her during the interval in the bar,

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masquerading as a French Canadian professor of organic chemistry who
was visiting Moscow for an academic conference. We started to chat and
I realised she was a very decent young lady, a junior diplomat on her first
overseas posting. I walked her back to her apartment building, and agreed
to meet me again. We soon got to know each other quite well, and during
one of our dates I bought her an amber bracelet, paid for by the SCD.
She was slim, with a good figure and it was not long before she was
inviting me back to her flat, but I deliberately kept my distance because I
had no wish to take advantage of her, whatever the wishes of the SCD,
and I grew to like her as a social equal who did not deserve to be
exploited. Certainly she was vulnerable and isolated, but that was all the
more reason to treat her with respect. My only difficulty was explaining
all this to the SCD who saw such people as opportunities, targets and
victims, not unlike the hard men from the Yard, and my remedy was to
extract myself in a manner that the Soviets would recognise as final, by
telling them that VERA was a virgin, and absolutely determined to
remain so until she was married.

I was uncomfortable working with what I referred to

contemptuously as ‘the Second Division’ and my discontent mounted
when I heard about some of the other projects they had in mind for me.
One suggestion was that I should mingle with groups of English tourists
to verify precisely who they were. At the time Dzerzhinsky Square
supposedly was being inundated with offers to spy from visitors.
According to the SCD, almost every tour group included someone who
would try and establish contact with the KGB and volunteer ro become an
agent. Allegedly the numbers had grown to such levels that they had
become unmanageable and the SCD was anxious to weep out the
suspected agents provocateurs before any time was wasted on them. Were

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they decoys or truly authentic? I thought it highly unlikely that the KGB
was being overwhelmed by wannabe spies, and I certainly saw no role for
myself in this exercise. Indeed, the last thing I wanted was to mix with
English tourists and risk being recognised. Accordingly, I rejected the
idea, as I did the SCD’s alternative project, to help stamp out some of the
rampant black-market activity. The SCD complained that illicit money
trading and icon smuggling had reached epidemic proportions, and
wanted to know whether this was mere opportunism or if it was being run
by organised crime. My intended task was to pose as an innocent tourist,
hang around the foreign currency bars and infiltrate the gangs, but again I
refused the proposal as such operations were too risky for my taste or
talents.

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 Chapter III
Moscow

After my lengthy vacation with Nick I returned to Moscow for more

tradecraft training, and then was given some unarmed combat training
from a harmless-looking man named Andrei who told me how to kill
someone by squeezing their Adam’s Apple, and blocking their windpipe.
He also showed me other lethal techniques, such as pressure to the carotid
article to stop the blood supply to the brain, and the use of a plastic bag
over the head to suffocate them. My tutor Andrei told me that his father
had headed the KGB’s elite Spetnaz special forces, and now lived next-
door to Leonid Brezhnev. According to his reputation, he had been sent to
Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to help round up the
counter-revolutionaries suspected of undermining the regime.

Andrei was fluent in English and Chinese, and demonstrated a

talent for card-tricks. He also led me to believe that he had been taught at
some stage by Kim Philby, a disclosure which followed a discussion we
had when Andrei corrected my pronunciation of the word ‘often’. He
preferred ‘offen’, a toff’s pronunciation which, he explained, had been
recommended by Philby, whom he regarded as a master of the King’s
English. I was amused by this episode, wondering how long anyone with
such an accent would last in south London’s underworld. Later I would
spend a lot of time with Andrei, and even went on an assignment with
him, meeting him in Finland. He was always tremendous company, and
we travelled across the Baltic together, visiting Lithuania, Latvia and
Estonia. It was on this trip that he challenged me about my alias of Eddie

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Herbert, and asked why Nick always called me John. I replied that John
was merely a codename, just as Nick was not really Viktor’s true name.
Obviously Andrei knew Nick’s true name, and pursued the matter no
further. The incident had no adverse impact on our relationship and, soon
afterwards, when I expressed some boredom at the constant round of
drinks, salt fish, more drinks, visits to battlefields and monasteries in
Estonia, he asked the KGB in Riga to provide some female company, and
I was supplied with a very attractive Estonian girl to keep me entertained.

Later I was introduced to Valentin, a KGB officer who had served

in London but, like Nick, had been expelled. Like the retiree codenamed
ARTHUR, he took me through the principles of secret writing, finding
dead-drops, surveying for signal sites, and handling money and passports.

Valentin, of course, was not his real name, and I soon learned that
he was Vladimir A. Loginov, a former KGB boxing champion who had
been a boy soldier during the siege of Leningrad and had witnessed the
most terrible of battle scenes. He been sent on an ill-fated mission to
Mexico to foment social unrest. That assignment had ended in disaster, so
he had learned English for a new posting to London. There he had been
declared persona non grata in 1968 when he had been caught hanging
around with a colleague near MI5’s secret garage in Barnard Road,
Battersea, making a note of the index numbers as the watcher vehicles
came in and out. Evidently MI5 had spotted Loginov and had tipped off
the police, who had sent a patrol car to arrest the two officials from the
Soviet Trade Delegation. According to Loginov, there had been quite a
scuffle in which he had floored two of the policemen, but they had taken
their revenge when he had been confronted with a whole crowd of their
colleagues back at Battersea Police Station who had given him a real

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seeing to. Despite this incident Loginov bore no grudge, and joked that
the KGB rezidentura in London at that time included “Longenough,
Strongenough and Goodenough, all characteristics of the Russian penis!”

Valentin accompanied me to his home in Leningrad, a flat

overlooking the racetrack, and regaled me with harrowing stories about
his experiences during the war. He also introduced me to a subordinate
who looked very like Vladimir Putin, who showed me around the city. It
was here that we seriously discussed my future, and I decided to throw in
my lot with the KGB. Thanks to Nina, or maybe the bald-headed barman
in his ridiculous costume who had introduced us, I had become a person
in the eyes of the KGB, and its personnel were treating me as a human
being. I was no longer a stranger in a foreign land, and not just an
interesting encyclopaedia on the subject of police corruption in London. I
had achieved some status among the KGB, and when I talked about the
future, especially with Nick, he was at pains to set my mind at rest.
Money had been sent to my mother, and had been delivered in person in
cash. No, Nick could not tell me the precise sum involved, but the
payment had been authorised at a very senior level. I had not seen my
family for three years, and Nick was willing to arrange for my mother to
bring my children out to Morocco so we could discuss our plans. Barbara
also received an unexpected cheque for £1,500, thus easing another
domestic problem, and allowing her to bring my son Alex to visit me in
Morocco. Did she want to join me and live in Africa? As it turned out,
she had acquired a new boyfriend in England who was willing to act as
father to my son, and had no wish to live abroad, but Nick helped me
handle these issues.

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 While in Rabat with Barbara I was able to solve a little mystery
that had bothered me ever since my conversations with Nick at the Black
Sea villa. He had seemed to know rather more about me than I had
anticipated, and had sprung Ian Harley’s name on me. Upon my return to
Morocco I had found that my motor caravan had been removed from the
car park where I had left it, and when the owner gave me a description of
the two men who had removed it weeks earlier, I immediately recognised
Marcel and Gold Tooth. Obviously the two KGB men had taken it to tear
it apart, which is what would have been required to find my carefully
hidden correspondence with Ian Harley. It would have taken a chain-saw
to reveal the caravan’s secrets, and the thought of some of my most
valued possessions, including my father’s fishing-rods, being ripped apart
by that pair had infuriated me. In fact I was so angry that I had stormed
off to the Soviet Embassy in Rabat and made a scene at the gate,
demanding to see Gold Tooth, but of course I was refused entry.
However, I must have made quite an impact because Nick later chastised
me for creating an incident, and warned me to keep away in future from
all Soviet diplomatic missions. Better still, he promised the KGB would
replace the missing vehicle.

If it had not been for Nina I might have been on my way back to
Morocco, sucked dry of my knowledge of police corruption and thrown
out to fend for myself, probably ending up in dead on some half-backed
mercenary job in a fly-blown corner of Africa. Instead, the KGB had won
me over and, by treating me with respect, had gained a potentially
valuable asset. Instead of working with an organisation that had taken the
attitude: ‘he must have done it so, if there isn’t any evidence let’s fit him
up’, I was collaborating with a huge, truly international structure which
employed armies of psychiatrists and psychologists, summing everyone

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up and deciding how best to approach a particular problem, identify their
strengths and weaknesses. As I was to find out, the KGB was absolutely
thorough in everything it did. The files I read in preparation for pitching a
target were compiled with meticulous care and had been drawn from
filched medial records, former boyfriends, indiscreet colleagues, open
sources and every other kind of databank. They had been to college in
Connecticut, had one brother, a family dog and a father whom she had
pissed off years earlier. She was bright, in her early twenties, probably
naïve, posted to a new embassy, and vulnerable to an approach from me,
once I had been briefed. The people I was working with were the cream
of the Soviet crop, well-educated, dedicated and a tremendous eye for
detail, all determined to leave nothing to chance. When I had been I had
been debriefed about police corruption I had anticipated a rather shallow
discussion about training, police flats, parties and that other unspoken
part of the job. Who was sleeping with whose wives? Divorce was an
occupational hazard in the Met and the policy of packing the police
families together into block accommodation inevitably led to extra-
martial affairs among those working on shifts. I expected the KGB would
want to know about how the Met was organised, but I never anticipated
the dozens of detailed questionnaires and the interest that would be taken
in the backgrounds of particular individuals. Nothing was too trivial to be
included in a subject’s file, and by the end of the process I felt as though
my brain had been emptied of all memory. The KGB was not just
interested in the personalities involved in corruption, but they wanted to
understand how the entire system worked. I soon found myself giving
what amounted to lectures on the skills required to rig the jury, nobble
barristers, influence judges, put in a word with the DPP, negotiate with a
defence solicitor, leave a loophole in the evidence for a defendant to
wriggle out of, or fortuitously find an especially incriminating piece of

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evidence at the last moment. Nowadays the police are obliged to disclose
exculpatory evidence, but in south London we routinely withheld any
awkward witness statement that might benefit the defence. Almost
everyone in the criminal justice system, at every level, had an interest in
winning convictions and banging up criminals, but on the way there were
dozens of opportunities to be exploited, and over the past decade I had
come across most of them. These ranged from the unopposed bail
application to the tip to the defence counsel, and they were all described
in my KGB talks. Bowing to popular demand, I also included a lecture on
the role of prostitutes in high society, and described how men from the
top draw in England seemed to enjoy the company of ladies of the night.

Once again, my remarks must have resonated with my audience,

for the KGB had always been fascinated by the scandal that had rocked
the Macmillan government in 1963. The Profumo affair had centred on
the clandestine affair conducted by the Secretary of State for War with a
beautiful call-girl, and had resulted in the suicide of Stephen Ward, the
society osteopath and intermediary who had introduced them. The Soviet
interest had focused on the assistant Naval Attaché, Eugene Ivanov, who
had also fallen for Christine Keeter, and although the entire business had
been the subject of a report written by Lord Denning, many mysteries
remained unsolved. Ivanov had been a GRU military intelligence officer,
so the KGB had acted as spectators throughout, but had been intrigued
when, during the Heath government, two of his ministers, Tony Lambton
and Lord Jellicoe, had resigned because of their relationship with a well-
known madam, Norma Levy. Not only was I well up to speed on these
events, but I was well aware of how Norma had not only been allowed to
operate by the police, and knew that her husband had been a Yard
informant for years. As might be imagined, the KGB furiously wrote up

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their notes as I regaled my audience with tales from the underworld and
British politics.

The one person I had first-hand knowledge of was, of course, Tom

Driberg MP, by now a senior and influential figure in the Labour Party
whom I knew to be a predatory homosexual who, it seemed to me, based
on my own contact with him at Bow Street, was not only complteley
corrupt himself, but had subverted plenty of others, including the MP
who ahd come to his rescue after I had arrested him for gross indecency.
How difficult would it have been to entrap him while he had been
cottaging in some public convenience? I thought I made a strong case for
exploiting him and his very extensive social and political connections, but
it turned out that the KGB knew all about him, and so did MI5. It seems
that Driberg had been recruited as a source inside the Young Communist
League at a very early age, in fact while he was still at school, by the
Security Service, but Anthony Blunt had revealed his role to the Soviets
during the war, and so he had been chucked out of the Communist Party
without explanation. Some years later, after the defection of his friend
Guy Burgess, Driberg had turned up in Moscow to write Guy Burgess: A
Portrait, a short and rather favourable biography of the notorious
homosexual, and doubtless the KGB had been given the opportunity then
to apply pressure on him. Later it was rumoured that he had collaborated
with the Czech intelligence service, so by the time I came on the scene to
make my contribution his file in Dzerzinshy Square must have been
bulging. Whatever the consequences, I never had any reservations about
recommending Driberg for the full KGB treatment, and I remain
convinced that he fully deserved whatever blackmail he had to endure, if
that is indeed what happened.

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 It may be that the KGB found my allegations about Moody, Virgo
and Drury quite hard to believe, but when this trio was arrested my stock
went through the roof. Of course, I had no idea that the Met would ever
go after the heart of the corruption in the Yard, but I had been writing
anonymous letters to various MPs and others, whenever the opportunity
had arisen, to alert people to the scale of the problem. I have no idea if
my bombardment of allegations had any effect on the decision to
investigate the top level of London’s CID, but I can say that the KGB was
hugely impressed when much of what I had detailed in my dossier
emerged in court at the end of the inquiries. I had given chapter and verse
on dozens of names, so whenever Jimmy Humphreys mentioned
someone, the KGB already had many of the details. Indeed, in some ways
the KGB was rather better informed about what had been going in at the
Yard than the very policemen brought in to investigate the suspect
detectives. I was tempted to speculate that perhaps the KGB had hoped to
exploit Moody, Virgo and Drury for their own purposes, or maybe the
KGB had been disappointed at not having capitalised earlier on what I
had told them, but the only result I could discern was that my standing
had increased considerably as a consequence of my very prescient,
expanded dossier. Clearly my enhanced status meant they were not going
to ignore my advice in the future.

During my discussions with Nick we debated where I should be

based in between my assignments for the KGB, and we both agreed that
Bulgaria was the best option. I could either live elsewhere, and come to
Bulgaria for my instructions, or I could live permanently in Sofia, but I
was never offered a flat in Moscow. I came to the conclusion that the
KGB was anxious to run their operations overseas with the minimal
direct links to Dzerzhinsky Square, doubtless because of the need for

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‘plausible deniability’ if anything went wrong during one of my more
risky enterprises, but was also keen to have me on call, reasonably close
by. Living in Africa did not appeal to me, but from what I had seen of
Sofia and the Black Sea, Bulgaria had plenty to recommend it. There I
would be entirely immune from arrest and as the Soviet ambassador was
effectively the most influential person in the entire country, I could live
under his protection, but away from the stifling supervision the KGB
would have exercised in Moscow. Furthermore, Bulgaria was well
positioned from my point of view, with good air links and easy access to
Africa and the Middle East. With this plan approved, Nick agreed to
arrange for me to meet Barbara in Morocco, and obtain all the required
forms for my exit and travel abroad. Ultimately, as he accepted, I wanted
to settle in an English-speaking country where I could be reunited with
my family, although in the meantime my adrenalin personality craved the
excitement of taking on the KGB’s assignments, not to mention the first-
class international travel, all expenses paid, with unlimited free medical
cover.

Now more confident about my future, Nick set me a task I was not
willing to fulfil. Apparently the KGB wanted to penetrate MI5, and
wanted me to recommend a suitable candidate who could be indoctrinated
while still at university and then sent to infiltrate the organisation. I had
stressed, when accepting the KGB’s proposal that I should work against
the CIA, that I would not act against British interests, and evidently the
KGB did not consider a recommendation as an overt act in way I
interpreted it. I probably could have come up with a couple of names, but
I was conscious that the Soviets probably had more experience of long-
term penetration operations than anyone else. Burgess, Maclean, Philby,
Blunt and Cairncross had all been recruited while still up at Cambridge,

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and the Soviets had been willing to invest long-term and wait for them to
climb into positions of influence. While Philby and Cairncross had joined
the Secret Intelligence Service, Blunt transferred from the Intelligence
Corps to the Security Service, the only known hostile penetration of MI5.
Apart from Blunt there had been once case, during the Second World
War, of a CPGB member working as a secretary in the registry, but no
action had been taken when she had been discovered, and she had been
quietly dismissed. What Nick had in mind was a similar exercise, taking a
suitable, committed candidate while still at university and grooming him
(or her) for a career in the Security Service, encouraging the agent to gain
promotion and acquire access to the organisations’ most treasured secrets.
Whilst I had little doubt this was probably one way to breach MI5’s
security, I was far from convinced the effort would be worthwhile. So
much would depend on the chosen individual who, even assuming they
sailed through the Positive Vetting screening procedures (as had every
post-war spy of any significance), might not be prepared to go the
distance, thereby wasting a very hefty investment. In my opinion, which I
kept to myself, the KGB would have been better advised to subvert a
Special Branch officer who might transfer across in the Security Service.
As I was well aware, Met detectives were very susceptible to large bribes,
and although the Branch men were somewhat detached from the rest of
the Yard, they were all made from the same cloth. Why take years in the
hope of placing a suitable candidate close to an MI5 recruiter when a
serving Branch officer could be bought for a fraction of the price, and
was already in an excellent position from which to manoeuvre himself
into the Gower Street headquarters of the Security Service. My solution
was to promise to consider the problem and make some suggestions to
Nick, but in the event I allowed the project, or at least my participation in
it, to run into the sand. This expedient avoided a potentially painful

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confrontation with my generous sponsors, and may even have served to
delay what was in any event going to be a very long-term plan.

It must be wondered whether I harboured any reservations about

throwing in my lot with the KGB, and whether I really believed I would
be allowed to work on my terms, avoiding compromising British
interests. This was, of course, at the height of the Cold War, at a period of
particularly high tension when Palestinian terrorism was spreading across
Europe and there was a strong suspicion in the west that the Soviets had
encouraged, if not actively sponsored atrocities in Germany, Italy and
France. When the CIA Chief of Station in Athens, Richard Welch, was
murdered two days before Christmas 1975, the dangers faced by CIA
men in the field became all too apparent, but from my discussions with
Oleg Kalugin it was clear that the KGB had no intention of killing their
opponents. On the contrary, they wanted to recruit them as moles and
were confident that, with the right preparation, they could attract high-
calibre defectors, cultivate new sources and exploit their existing ‘walk-
ins’ more efficiently. It seemed that the KGB had received some excellent
offers of collaboration from the most unexpected quarters, and the
question to be addressed was one of their integrity. Were they on the level
when they made their approaches, or were they acting as double agents in
elaborate sting operations masterminded by the CIA or some other
American counter-intelligence agency? Kalugin’s own experience with
Robert Lipka and John Walker showed that it was not exclusively senior
personnel who enjoyed the best access to classified information, and in
both cases relatively junior men had been entrusted with handling the
most sensitive data, even if it was simply to burn it. Those circumstances,
of course, were ideal for espionage because it provided an opportunity to

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steal the original documents with no danger of them ever being missed,
thereby prompting an unwelcome investigation.

The shooting of Richard Welch, at his home in Athens, turned out

to be the handiwork of a mysterious left-wing, domestic Greek terror
group which styled itself ‘November 17’ and immediately, publicly
claimed responsibility for his assassination. It seemed that ‘N17’, as it
was also known, had identified Welch as the CIA station chief after his
name, true role, home address had been published in an Athens
newspaper, a disclosure blamed not on the KGB but on a young CIA
renegade, Phillip Agee. Beset with divorce and money troubles in
Mexico, Agee had approached the Cuban intelligence agency and had
gained its sponsorship for an exposé of the CIA in which he named
hundreds of CIA officers and their agents. The impact on the clandestine
service, where the majority of their personnel posted abroad operated
under diplomatic cover, had been devastating, and Welch had been the
first such victim. N17, formed in opposition to the American-backed
military junta of the Greek colonels, was pledged to rid Greece of all
foreign influence and had targeted Welch after Agee’s revelation. The
death had shocked the KGB which much preferred to engage its
adversary with more subtle tactics, of which I was but one component.
Nobody would die as a result of my activities, although a few marriages
might suffer, and the KGB might engage in a little blackmail, exploit
some greed or indulge some of the other well-established tactics of ‘the
great game’.

The person to encourage me in thinking of Sofia as a suitable base

was Valentin who confided to me that his career had been wrecked by
Oleg Lyalin. He had no hope of any future postings abroad because he

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was completely compromised by the defector, so no NATO country
would ever accept him under diplomatic cover and, even if one did so, his
operation usefulness would be zero because he would be bound to attract
so much surveillance that he would be completely neutralised. In thse
circumstances I represented his ticket to a much coveted overseas
assignment. In short, Valentin was desperate to get out of Moscow, and I
represented his ticket. We both likes boxing and tennis, and he literally
begged me to tell Nick that Sofia was the best solution, and that Valentin
should accompany me. It was from Valentin that I finally understood the
depth of feeling within the KGB about Lyalin's betrayal, and learned for
the first time that the offer made to me to assassinate him had been
entirely unofficial. Apparently Andropov had vetoed a plan to have the
defector murdered and the proposal put to me in Morocco had come from
an entirely unofficial group of freelancers who had seen their own careers
curtailed by their subordinate's revelations. Lyalin had made some lurid
claims about the role of Department V, and this was a topic of
considerable, continuing sensitivity. The notorious 'Thirteenth
Department' had been shut down following the embarrassing revelations
of another defector, Bogdan Stashinsky, in 1953, when he had confessed
to the assassination of a Ukrainian nationalist leader in West Germany
with a precision murder weapon that fired cyanide gas and left almost no
trace of its use. Stashinsky's disclosures had been confirmed by another
KGB killer, Nikolai Khoklov, and the awkward, world-wide publicity
given to this pair had provided the west with a veritable propaganda coup.
All trace of the Thirteenth Department had been eradicated, although the
actual technical capability to mount what the KGB had termed 'wet jobs'
had been covertly transferred to the Line F specialists of Department V.
As ell as compromising every KGB officer he had ever come into contact
with, and identifying his contemporaries operating under alias in

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diplomatic posts by looking at western collections of passport photos,
Lyalin had committed the unforgivable sin of reopening the whole issue
of the KGB's policy on assassination. The topic was particularly touchy
because, unbeknownst to me at the time, Oleg Kalugin had been ordered
by Vladimir Kryuchkov to help the Bulgarian intelligence service to kill a
dissident, Georgi Markov, who had incurred Todor Zhivkov's displeasure
by making unflattering remarks about him on the BBC World Service's
Bulgarian broadcasts. Reluctantly Kalugin had supplied the Bulgarians
with a gun disguised as an umbrella, and this had been used to fire a
pellet filled with a lethal dose of ricin into Markov's leg as he walked
across a bridge over the Thames while on his way to work at Bush House.
Markov had died soon afterwards, although another attempt, on the life of
a Bulgarian defector in Paris, failed narrowly. While Andropov preferred
to disassociate the modern KGB from such activities, and had vetoed
proposals to kill other defectors, in Australia and Canada, his FCD chief
(and future successor as Chairman), Vladimir Kryuchkov had taken a
rather more flexible, pragmatic attitude to curry favour in Sofia and had
been willing to sanction the Markov hit. Knowledge of this decision had
been known to only a very few, but Andropov had argued that if Lyalin
had been murdered it would have served to confirm the validity of his
allegations. However, this was not a view shared by men such as Valentin
who had been caused very considerable inconvenience and disadvantage
by Lyalin's treachery. It was through confidences like these that I was
able to begin to understand how the KGB functioned.

After Leningrad we visited Yalta, Sochi and Sevastopol in the

Crimea, and then spent three very pleasant days in a private train
compartment, complete with our own stewardess, to Sofia. There I was
put into the same flat in the middle of a militia block in Struga, in the

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centre of the city, as I had been in 1973, only on this occasion I was
without Anka Mladinova, my girlfriend whom, I now knew, had been
planted on me. Valentin was attached to the local Soviet embassy to be
close to me, and I was given a job as an editor in the Sofia Press news
agency. This suited Valentin who came up with all sorts of ideas to keep
us entertained, including our membership of a prestigious film club. At
that time the only movies on general release in Bulgaria were stunningly
boring documentaries about tractor production, whereas the Party’s film
club viewed the films undubbed and acted as a censorship panel to decide
whether they were suitable for sub-titles and a wider audience. Not
surprisingly, the films we saw were all deemed inappropriate for the rest
of the population, but our membership cards gave us access to an
important social centre in Sofia, one of the few venues in the capital that
served imported drinks and really good coffee. As can be imagined,
single men with access to these luxuries were in constant demand in
Sofia.

As for my office work, it was ludicrously easy, as I discovered

when I was introduced to the head of the Sofia Press’s English section.
Foreign broadcasts were jammed so Bulgarians had little opportunity to
study the language from native-speakers, and I was amazed to find that
the English section consisted of a dozen girls, some of them very good-
looking, who were employed in translating Bulgarian texts into English,
reliant entirely upon dictionaries, but with absolutely no linguistic skill.
The results were quite absurd, and it took almost no effort on my part to
transform the nonsense into a reasonably intelligible version. For this
trifling task I was offered four hundred Lev a month, which was about
four times the salary earned by an experienced editor. The only slight
hiccup I experienced at work was as a result of a report submitted by a

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girl who turned out to the daughter of the Minister of the Interior. She
obviously had gained her post through nepotism, and when I criticised her
disastrously low performance she complained about the ‘mysterious
Englishman’ who was making her life difficult, but when her father went
to see the Soviet Ambassador he ordered him to instruct his daughter not
to ask any further questions about me! Suitably chastised, the girl had
confided to her colleagues that I was indeed an important mystery man
with friends in very high places, which then made me the object of
considerable, and welcome, attention from them.

One of my friends was Yuri Zarvalanov, the son of one of the two
parachute agents who turned Bulgaria over to the Soviets in 1945, and
another was Andrei Lukanov. Their fathers had been friends during the
1923 uprising and had fled to Russia where they both had married
Russian Jewesses. Andrei was later to become leader of the Communist
Party, but was assassinated outside his apartment in Sofia in 1996. Yuri
later went to Austria, where he was thought to have hidden a quantity of
the Communist Party’s funds, but he died of a brain tumour.

Although my official job was as an editor with the news agency, I

was commissioned in the summer of 1975 to prepare programmes for a
new channel for tourists on Bulgarian TV. Foreigners had come flooding
into the country to enjoy the Black Sea beaches and they made a serious
contribution to the economy. To encourage them, the completely
unwatchable domestic broadcasts were improved to cater to a more
modern audience, and my role, in between missions for the KGB, was to
supervise an English language channel. Whenever the KGB needed me, I
would be called to a rendezvous, and invariably met Valentin in the park
directly opposite the Soviet embassy. Occasionally we went to the nearby

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Park Hotel which turned out to be a favourite watering-hole for the local
Turkish community and, as I later learned, one of the places later used by
Mehmet Ali Agca, the terrorist who was to shoot Pope John Paul II in
May 1981.

On 24 March 1975, a university friend of my assistant Stoyana

Angelov, brought Nellie to my apartment as a fourth for a card game, and
somewhat unconvincingly I was introduced as a Bulgarian named Ivan
Ivanov, although she realised within a few moments that I was not really
a Bulgarian. I was immediately attracted to her, and although my interest
was not immediately reciprocated, she told me a little of her background.
her father was an academic, a professor of agriculture at the Bulgarian
Higher Institute of Agriculture, and her mother was an agronomist and a
statistician. She had lived in Cuba in 1964 with her father, and then had
studied English philology at Sofia University. After graduation she had
married and had a son, and then worked with Intercommerce, the
Bulgarian foreign trade organisation. In spite of her initial hesitation, we
were soon seeing quite a lot of each other, and she accepted that I had a
job with the Communist International movement which required me to
travel frequently. It would be a long time before I came even close to
telling her the truth about my real background and my work for the KGB.
Naturally, I was not keen to share with her the kind of work I had been
prepared for, and when I learned the details of another mission, far
removed from my Romeo activities, I had another reason not to confide
in her. The KGB wanted me to re-establish contact with a couple of my
mercenary team and arrange a hit in a West African country. Although I
had turned down the Lyalin proposal, I accepted this one because the
target was not British, but a local Communist suspected of having sold
out to the Americans. In mercenary circles this is known as ‘moving

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somebody on’ and I had few qualms about undertaking it. Such events are
part of the way of life in many African countries, where life is cheap and
political power is invariably accompanied by bloodshed. The operation
was executed faultlessly, which heightened my standing in the KGB and I
was given a further assignment in Ghana, where I already had particularly
good connections.

My business partner in Accra had been Dr George Busby, and

when the KGB first outlined their problem, I had been able to promise an
easy solution, confident that he would put me in touch with the right
people. The country was then in the hands of a military junta of five army
officers, some of whom had been delivered by my friend the doctor, who
had become close to their families. At least one of the left-leaning
governments was a fully paid-up KGB agent, but another was suspected
of being in contact with the CIA, and maybe planning a coup. In that part
of Africa the local state-run radio station was always a prime target in any
take-over, for whoever controlled the airwaves could monopolise the
country’s communications. Aware that Accra’s transmitters were very
vulnerable to a surprise attack, the KGB had wanted to build an
alternative station, heavily guarded by Spetsnaz-trained Special Forces,
which could act as a back-up if the main broadcaster fell into the hands of
an adversary. My task, with an unlimited budget, was to establish and
protect an alternative site, and this I accomplished easily with Busby’s
help to import the necessary components and to acquire the necessary real
estate. This earned me a VIP trip as a reward, ending in my second visit
to Moscow where I was reunited with Nick briefly, before returning to
the fleshpots of Sofia.

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 My very first Romeo mission was to South Africa where I was
deployed against a woman who worked as a librarian in Pretoria but
appeared to have access to the US embassy. Was she a CIA professional,
and why was she working for a cultural body? This may appear a rather
mundane task, but the implications were considerable because the Peace
Corps and the US Agency for International Development were the two
American organisations which the CIA was specifically prohibited from
using as cover. If really was a CIA officer working under 'non-official
cover', then the implications were considerable and there was much
mischief to be made by the KGB. If, on the other hand, she was innocent,
but for some reason enjoyed regular access to the embassy premises, that
too was an advantage that could be exploited, depending upon where she
was free to roam. The ultimate objective, of course, was to read whatever
was in the ambassador's safe, or to copy material from the coderoom, but
lower on the scale were more achievable goals, such as placing a listening
device in a conference room used for sensitive discussions, attaching a
bug to a telephone, or inside the office of a senior diplomat. Even if a
recruited access agent could not achieve any of these ideals, she might be
able to pick up gossip or serve to verify information from other sources,
such as the exact location of the CIA station within the building, the staff
working there, the identity of the Chief of Station and the names of any of
the low-echelon cipher clerks working the crypto-equipment. In short,
there was much to be accomplished with the cooperation of even the most
junior embassy employee.

I received a short briefing about my target, Marianne, and received

a signal plan and meeting protocol for establishing contact with the local
rezidentura which, in South Africa, where there was no Soviet embassy,
was to be an illegal structure headed by an illegal rezident. I was only to

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make contact, by leaving innocuous chalk marks in particular places on
specified days of the week, if I had received instructions to do so, or in
the event of an emergency, and if I was to meet a KGB controller I was
given a form of words to identify myself, and to confirm his bona-fides. I
was also given details of a couple of bank accounts in West Africa to
which I could gain access in the event that I needed emergency funds, but
otherwise I was to use my common-sense and initiative, follow my quite
detailed instructions. A particular signal would indicate that I had arrived
safely, and another would show that I had found my target. Reports on
my progress would be left at a pre-arranged dead-drop, and whenever I
had filled a drop I would leave another signal. This was all standard
tradecraft, but South Africa was a hostile environment and I would be
vulnerable to arrest by the notorious Bureau of State Security. The risk
was low, as the holder of a British passport, but I would be operating in a
country run by an efficient, authoritarian security apparatus with very
close links to the British and American intelligence agencies. One slip,
and my true identity might be established with a single telephone call.
Worse, if the South Africans suspected I was working on behalf of the
Soviets, I could be in deep trouble, isolated in an interrogation centre for
months, if not years, without trial.

It did not take me long to discover that Marianne was just what she
appeared to be, a librarian with no CIA connections, although she did
appear to have almost unlimited access to the embassy. She had a very
healthy, active sexual appetite although initially she preferred to give me
oral sex rather than allow full intercourse, but eventually she succumbed.
When I established she was neither a diplomat nor a CIA officer I
reported my findings to the KGB which doubtless arranged for someone
else to take my place and exploit the psychological assessment to which I

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had contributed. On the rebound from a former lover, she was certainly
vulnerable, and perhaps might have been beguiled into lifting the
occasional document or ‘ear-wigging’ an indiscreet conversation. That, of
course, was not my concern, and I flew home, mission accomplished.

In June 1975 I left for another job in Africa, to target a Chinese

diplomat, but I was beaten up by three Chinese bodyguards, and returned
on 10 August having contracted malaria. My assignment was to
blackmail a Chinese diplomat whom the KGB knew had acquired a black
girlfriend. He had apparently had a girlfriend at a previous post in north
Africa, and I mailed a letter purporting to come from his ex-girlfriend’s
brother, claiming his sister was pregnant, and threatening that unless he
co-operated his superiors would be informed, which would immediately
end his career. Being reluctant to hand it to him at his embassy, as I had
been instructed, I delivered the letter to him at a diplomatic function, but
he threw it on the floor and called his bodyguards who hustled me out of
the restaurant and gave me a good seeing-to outside.

My other assignment in Dar-es-Salaam was to report on the

Chinese troops arriving on the docks, and when I cast my eye over them I
was impressed by their discipline. They were marched off the ships and
went straight onto the railway line, working alongside the natives.
However, while the locals were immune to malaria, the Chinese fell like
flies from disease, and I had heard from a friend who ran the crematorium
in the town that on average just over one Chinese a day was dying in
Tanzania. Instead of being buried in Tanzania, the urns containing their
ashes were sent back to China.

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 Upon my return to Sofia on 10 August I had a new, spacious three-
bed roomed flat on the Giorhiou Dimitrov with balconies overlooking the
mosque. Here I was joined by Nellie who accepted my proposal of
marriage and left her husband to share my life. I had planned to spend
Christmas with Nellie but I was sent on a mission to northern Europe
with Andrei, and returned from Finland in January 1976. My next
mission was in March, also to Western Europe, but discretion prevents
me from describing in any detail what took place, so we can move ahead
to my adventures in India.

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 Chapter IV
India

I took Nellie on holiday to the Hotel Granada on the Black Sea in June
and upon my return stayed at the Hemus Hotel in Sofia in preparation for
my next trip to Moscow, where I was briefed on my new assignment. I
was to make a permanent base in an English-speaking country, and the
KGB had decided to send me to India, but before establishing myself
there as a legitimate businessman, I was to fly to Ethiopia and take a
connecting flight to west Africa and develop my cover in Accra and
Dakar. My objective was to build a legend as a businessman running an
import-export firm, print business cards and open bank accounts in
several different cities to fund my new existence in India. There I was to
pose as a merchant specialising in trading with various African countries,
selling jute sacks from India for the cocoa crop, for the but my real task
was to cultivate Sanjay Ghandi.

Over the past two years India had been ruled by Sanjay’s mother,
Indira, but her will had been imposed through a state of emergency until
her temporary fall from power in 1977, which was to last three years. She
had taken draconian powers, imprisoned her political opponents and
suspended democracy, but the KGB was concerned about the influence
exercised by her son Sanjay. The suspicion in Moscow was that Indira
wanted to make her country less reliant on the Soviets who regarded it
not exactly as a satellite like members of the Warsaw Pact, but certainly
far from non-aligned. India massive army and air force were almost
entirely equipped by the Soviets, and the trade between the two countries
was enormous. While the KGB was anxious to develop this relationship,
there were fears that Indira had other ideas, and my task was to establish

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myself in New Delhi and cultivate contacts in Sanjay’s circle. Unlike his
Cambridge-educated brother Rajiv, the Air India pilot from whom he was
estranged, Sanjay had acquired quite a reputation as a playboy with
decadent western tastes, and was later to die in an accident while
practising aerobatics in his biplane. Evidently the belief in Dzerzhinsky
Square was that I was just the person to move in on him. Who was I to
disagree with such a judgment?

Before I reached India I was asked by Nick, at the last moment, to

undertake a couple of missions in Africa, and the first was in Zaire where
my target was the daughter of the local CIA Chief of Station who was of
great interest to the KGB because he was believed to exercise
considerable influence over President Mobutu. According to my KGB
briefing, the CIA officer was also a doctor who treated Mobutu for a
variety of sexually-transmitted diseases he had picked up through his
many encounters with infected prostitutes. My task was to befriend the
CIA man’s daughter, gain access to his household and find out what
information I could, especially about his relationship with the president.
This turned out to be an easy assignment, for the girl told me that she had
occasionally gone to Mobutu’s palace with her father, and had found the
president to be a kindly, grand-fatherly figure who patted her on the head
and offered her nuggets of gold, the size of jelly babies, from a jar he
invariably produced for favoured visitors. These nuggets were in the
original state, unrefined, as they had been picked up, and were quite an
incentive for her to accompany her father. The reality, of course, was that
Mobutu was a monster; responsible for the deaths of thousands of his
own people, and on this occasion I felt no reservations about helping to
undermine the American grip over him. In the end, however, my

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activities were limited to pursuing the daughter and writing reports on the
other American diplomats to whom she introduced me.

My second mission was in Benin, where there was a girl at the US

embassy who was believed to be the CIA Station Chief’s secretary.
According to the KGB, this girl had been having an affair with a French
nightclub owner in the capital, Cotonou, and was vulnerable. She had
already confided in the local KGB rezident, and he had reported this to
Moscow. My task had been to cultivate the target and maybe recruit her,
so I checked in to the local hotel and made contact with an intermediary
to arrange an introduction. The KGB rezident invited me to his home for
beetroot soup and what he believed to be a decent bottle of wine, but
actually was vinegar. He showed me a picture of my target, Kate, but
almost as soon as I got back to my hotel she turned up in my hotel’s
swimming-pool. We were soon getting to know each other quite well in
my room, and she took a very professional approach to establishing my
state of health. A detailed inspection took place and she persuaded me
that she was experienced, and maybe even a honey trap. Thus far the
American women I had encountered had been quite inexperienced,
somewhat inhibited and a little naïve, but Kate was very different, so
much so that I was suspicious of her, and I was right to be so.

Kate invited me to a party the following evening and I arranged to

pick her up the US embassy. I had rented a car, but when I arrived she
was not ready, and I was invited by a black servant, wearing white
gloves, in to the embassy to wait for her. As it was air-conditioned I
agreed enthusiastically, and accepted a drink from him, but I realise that I
am being watched by a surveillance camera. During the Cold War, and
maybe today too, all American embassies have a ‘walk-in room’

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conveniently close to the entrance lobby were potential defectors can be
interviewed. Ostensibly they are ordinary consular interview rooms
where visa applicants and others can talk in some privacy, away from the
prying eyes of receptionists and other locally-employed staff, but in
reality they are equipped with covert video cameras and wired for sound.
This expedient allows the CIA to maintain an accurate record of precisely
what a ‘walk-in’ is offering, and help judge from his demeanour whether
he is authentic. Since, historically, the CIA’s very best information had
come entirely fortuitously from these entirely unexpected sources who
turned up at diplomatic premises without a prior appointment, these
rooms had become an essential component in the collection of secret
intelligence. For all of its investment in cultivating and pitching their
adversaries, the best spies had been those who had been self-recruited.
The problem was discriminating between the decoys and ‘dangles’
employed by the opposition, and this was true for all the participants in
the Cold War. While the putative informant was making his pitch his
every mannerism was being recorded so as to assist in establishing his
bona-fides, verifying his identity and checking on the authenticity of
information. Doubtless the room had been sterilised to collect DNA
samples, and other forensic evidence. However, tt occurred to me that the
CIA now had my fingerprints, had my photographs, and I was isolated on
American territory. An American diplomat then appeared to ask me some
questions, but I was suitably indignant, claiming to be a white hunter
surveying for a safari park in Benin’s Parcs National de Niger W, so-
called because the river Niger almost surrounded it, almost as the letter
‘W’.

Fortunately my legend as John Frederick Freeman was watertight,

so after a few hours of questions I was released, but I wasted no time in

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leaving the country before the local CIA station could complete their
checks. My passport was an authentic British passport, but if my photo
was circulated to Langley, and then maybe to other CIA stations in the
region, I could be in trouble. Bulletins known as ‘burn notices’ are
occasionally distributed by the CIA to its overseas stations to warn of
conmen or agents who have lost their usefulness, and I had no wish to
have my details circularised. I simply wanted to to proceed with my main
mission, to establish myself as a prosperous businessman in India,
exporting jute sacks to Africa from Bangladesh. Coincidentally, the main
jute sack factory in Ghana had burnt down shortly before my arrival, so
my cover story had quite a topical ring to it as I was supposedly selling a
commodity that was now in considerable demand. In addition, I was to
buy Atlas bicycles through an agent in Delhi for shipping to Ghana, and
negotiate the purchase of chick-peas. To enhance my cover as a
successful international trader I rented a penthouse flat in the embassy
district of New Delhi, known as the golf links, and close to the Bulgarian
embassy, and started to enjoy myself, particularly on the embassy circuit.

My KGB controller in India was the Russian wife of an important

Indian steel tycoon, and she ran an ‘illegal’ network across the entire
country. Under her instructions I befriended an English woman whom the
KGB codenamed JILL, and another target, a member of the Bronfman
family that owned the Canadian distillers, Seagrams. However, my first
contact with Leonid V. Shebarshin, the embassy’s legal rezident, was as a
consequence of running low on funds from a bank account that had been
set up in Senegal. There should have been large amount of cash on
deposit for me, more than enough for me to buy a house or a local
company, but someone had emptied the account, and this made me very
nervous, worried that perhaps I had become the victim of a defector. I

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made a signal requesting a meeting, according to the procedure that had
been set up before my departure, and eventually I had a meeting with
someone from the local KGB rezidentura. We established each other’s
credentials through a series of pre-agreed passwords, and I explained that
my bank account in Senegal had been looted. More discussions took
place, and finally I was met by the tall, black-haired rezident, Leonid
Shebashin, but instead of helping me out financially he gave me several
idiotic missions to target Americans, one at the embassy and others at the
consulates at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. I considered this duplication
to be too dangerous, and I thought Shebarshin was exploiting me for
short-term advantage, placing me in considerable jeopardy. Whilst I was
perfectly happy to operate against the Americans, I had not forgotten my
experience in Dar-es-Salaam and I knew that I should not push my luck.
Shebarshin seemed oblivious to my complaints, and sent me on a job to
Katmandhu, to report on the Chinese occupation of Nepal. It was on one
of these missions that I met the stunning Hilda Gardner, a vivacious
Puerto Rican who was married to an American dentist, but wherever we
went she attracted far too much attention. She had been to the Woodstock
rock festival where she had danced naked and achieved worldwide fame
when her photograph had circulated around the world, making her the
embodiment of the free-love culture than sweeping the globe. Although
she was of no great operational significance, she provided me with cover
and gave me access to some useful contacts. When an American diplomat
fell for Hilda I quietly stepped aside and encouraged the relationship,
reporting the liaison to the KGB who doubtless found a way to exploit the
fact that he was in an adulterous affair. I was not remotely jealous or
resentful at losing Hilda, and instead turned the situation to my advantage
by seeking advice on my 'betrayal' from Jenny, another target and one of

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Hilda's acquaintances. This was, of course, the most cold-blooded,
hypocritical exploitation of women

My assignment to India had been Kalugin’s idea, but it had proved

to be one of his less good ones because Leonid Vladimirovich, who had
been in the capital since 1971 when he had been given the assignment of
heading the PR (political) line. In 1977 he had been promoted to the post
of rezident, but I thought he was completely unqualified to be running a
rezidentura. I soon discovered that Shebarshin had been a regular
diplomat, a graduate in 1958 of the oriental faculty of Moscow
University’s Institute of Foreign Relations, and had served twice in
Islamabad, for a total of six years, before he had been co-opted by the
rezident, Yakov P. Medyanik, to work with the KGB, and then had
attended the Andropov Institute to graduate as a FCD officer.

Little did I know that I had chosen a particularly powerful enemy

who was to be appointed Chief of the First Chief Directorate in 1988
when Vladimir Kryuchkov was made the KGB’s chairman. He had spent
an unusual, continuous thirteen years in south Asia, and was coming to
the end of his appointment in Delhi, destined for the senior post in the
FCD’s Seventeenth (India) Department in Moscow before completing his
last overseas assignment, as rezident in Tehran. Although he was
considered a high-flyer at Dzerzhinsky Square, and was destined to go
right to the top, I thought he had little idea on how to run clandestine
operations. He may have had diplomatic skills in abundance, and may
have been highly regarded by the senior management as an expert on the
region, but I never saw any signs of them. As far as I was concerned he
was an exploiter, looking for short-term advantages and results
irrespective of the risks or the possible consequences for me. While he

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was fully protected by diplomatic immunity, had operated in relatively
benign environments in countries friendly to the Soviet Union, and had
plenty of genuine experience as a diplomat to back up his cover, I was in
an entirely different boat. If I got into trouble the very last place I could
turn to for assistance would be my own British High Commission where
any misfortune would doubtless be transmitted instantly by the local MI5
representative to London. Whatever other trouble I might be in, my
passport alone would be enough to earn me prison time in India unless
the KGB exercised some influence on my behalf, and I was under no
illusions about what Moscow’s attitude would be to any potentially
embarrassing incident. There was, after all, virtually nothing to link me
directly to the Russians or the Soviet embassy, so I would be on my own.
These were considerations of which the unsympathetic Shebarshin
seemed entirely oblivious.

The KGB’s plan, settled before my departure, was for Nellie to join
me in India after she had taken her university diploma, and maybe be
given a job in the Bulgarian embassy, and I believed this had been
approved at the highest level, but shortly before her finals she was
arrested by the militia and asked to sign a declaration that she would have
no further contact with me. Reluctantly she had signed, but then she was
threatened by a KDS colonel named Domchev who told her she would
never see her son again and end up in a stone quarry, the traditional fate
in Bulgaria of dissidents sentenced to the labour camps. Naturally Nellie
had absolutely no idea about my work for the KGB, although she knew
that I visited Russia quite frequently. She thought I was some kind of
Communist official, although neither she, nor anyone else in her family,
was a member of the Party. Indeed. It had been her skill as a language
teacher that had probably protected her from worse sanctions in the past.

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She had taught dozens of pupils, including diplomats and senior
government officials, and was recognised as an expert in her field. On
one occasion, when the militia had harassed her for not having voted in
one of the elections, which invariably produced a 100% result for the
Communists, she had resisted the pressure and had been left alone.

Although the militia and the KDS were different organisations,

threats from either had to be taken seriously, and upon her release Nellie
went straight to the central post office and sent me a telegram in a false
name ‘Nina Holecec’ which, interpreted by me, meant in English, ‘I’m in
a hole, please check!’ I understood immediately so I telephoned Nellie,
realised she was in trouble, and jumped on the first flight back to
Bulgaria, puzzled by what had happened. Why had Nellie come under
pressure from the KDS when I was supposed to be working for the KGB?

I arrived in Sofia on 13 July 1977, my birthday, and went straight

to Nellie’s flat on Ivan Assen II where I found her in a state of
considerable distress. Far from having looked after her in my absence, as
I had been promised, the KDS had been bullying her, and clearly had no
intention of allowing her to join me in India as had been agreed.
Infuriated, I sat down at Nellie’s father’s desk and wrote a fifty page
report explaining why I had left India, complaining about Shebarshin’s
unprofessional behaviour, and demanding an explanation for Nellie’s
treatment. In my view the entire episode had been a complete waste of
time, and I knew that elaborate preparations had been required before I
had set off for Africa. Someone had emptied the main operational account
in Senegal, and someone had reneged on the plan to let us settle in India.
Having completed my catalogue of complaints, I delivered it to the Soviet

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embassy and, having lit the blue touch-paper, waited for the inevitable
fireworks.

As I should have expected, my diatribe created all kinds of

problems and I was informed by Valentin that I had been suspended, and
would receive a small allowance until a decision had been taken in
Moscow on my future. I had, in effect, been accused of desertion, having
left my mission in India without Moscow’s permission, and without the
knowledge of the rezident. The first offence was clearly regarded as a
grave one by the KGB which was more used to dealing with Soviet
personnel who were under an iron discipline, and not with someone such
as myself, who was really a volunteer. KGB illegals sent abroad to live in
target countries undergo lengthy training and make considerable
sacrifices to complete their missions which can last for years. Their
advantage is that they can work in complete isolation from the Soviet
rezidentura which, in a hostile environment such as London, Washington
DC or New York, would be the subject of intensive surveillance and
technical monitoring. In these circumstances the legal rezident would be
inhibited from conducting all his usual espionage duties, such as meeting
agents, recruiting sources, surveying signal sites and servicing dead-letter
drops. By passing these activities to an illegal network, controlled
independently by an illegal rezident, the risk of compromise through
routine surveillance is minimised. In many respects illegals are a uniquely
Soviet phenomenon, as their counterparts scarcely exist in other
equivalent services. For example, the CIA send a tiny number of their
own officers abroad under ‘non-official cover’, and occasionally the
British will give SIS officers temporary commercial or journalistic
covers, but none devote their lives to the role as the do the members of
Directorate S. Whereas the Soviet system provided a continuous supply

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of dedicated, ideologically-motivated volunteers keen to work at great
personal risk in an alien society, perhaps for decades at a time, such
people simply do not exist in SIS or the CIA.

Illegals do not enjoy the luxury of diplomatic immunity so if

arrested they can face serious charges, and both Rudolf Abel and Gordon
Lonsdale were examples of the dedicated professionals willing to spend
years away from their family, and endure prosecution and imprisonment
in the west, whilst all the time remaining silent about the true nature of
their assignments. Indeed, neither the FBI nor MI5 had any idea of the
true identities of Abel or Lonsdale, even after they had been kept in
custody for years and eventually swapped in a spy exchange. Abel had
been arrested in New York in 1957 and had served just under five years
of a thirty year sentence when he was freed, but never admitted his real
name was William Fischer, or that he had been born in England.
Similarly, Lonsdale pretended to have been a Canadian, but actually he
was Konon Molody, a Soviet-born KGB officer who had been educated
in California. Arrested in 1961, he had been sentenced to twenty years,
and was released in 1969. I was never in the same category because I had
never spied against the countries in which I had operated. My targets had
been Americans, but I would never have risked operating in the United
States.

I argued, of course, that the allegation of desertion simply did not

apply to me. I had agreed voluntarily to go to India, and part of that
agreement was that arrangements were to be made for Nellie to join me
once she had sat her exams. Instead, she had been the subject of
harassment and that meant the deal was off. I was not a KGB officer born
and bred into clandestine work who could be intimidated, or who would

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accept his family becoming tacit hostages. My commitment to Nellie was
far more important than my relationship with the KGB, which I regarded
merely as a business expedient, and one that I could walk away from
anytime I wished.

From the KGB’s standpoint, my sudden disappearance from Delhi

must have been very embarrassing and caused all sorts of problems. Did
it mean that I was really a hostile agent that had successfully penetrated
their organisation and then withdrawn from the scene after I had
completed my role as a double agent? Had I defected to the Americans,
having gained sufficient knowledge to be useful to them? Would I betray
the identities of the Soviet personnel I had been in contact with? Would
Shebarshin be exposed as the KGB’s rezident and expelled from India?
Admittedly that last fear would have been unfounded because although
India supposedly was unaligned, it was then really a Soviet client state,
heavily dependent on Moscow. If Shebarshin’s role had not been declared
to the Indian government, his identification might have been exploited by
the Americans, and it certainly would have limited his ability to travel
further afield. In all likelihood, Shebarshin himself probably would not
have been too concerned about personal exposure, but for a rezident to
experience the defection of one of his agents, or even to have to admit
that one of his charges was out of his control would be an appalling
humiliation. Plenty of promising careers had been terminated by such
undetected defections, and it was every rezident’s worst nightmare to
experience the loss of a trusted subordinate, such as Oleg Lyalin, Oleg
Gordievsky or Mikhail Butkov. In each case their rezident had been held
by Moscow to have been negligent, and their prospects of advancement
sent into freefall. Although I never had access to the secrets of
Shebarshin’s rezidentura, the KGB’s counter-intelligence people would

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have wondered what secrets I had acquired, and worried about others I
might have compromised. Rudolf Abel had been caught by the KGB after
his principal assistant, Reino Hayhanen, had defected to the US embassy
in Paris while on his way back to Moscow, having been recalled to face
disciplinary action for his poor performance. Although relatively low in
the food chain, Hayhanen had given the FBI enough information for them
to trap his rezident. Similarly, Lonsdale had been spotted by MI5 as he
had held a rendezvous in London with Harry Houghton, a spy who had
fallen under suspicion, and that one fatal encounter had served to
incriminate Lonsdale and two other members of his network, Morris and
Lona Cohen, alias Peter and Helen Kroger. All had been tried and
imprisoned simply because Lonsdale had failed to shake off MI5’s
surveillance teams and take some elementary precautions. Thus the KGB
was well justified in its paranoid attitude towards defection, and was
especially fearful about the loss of illegals, a group considered an elite
within the organisation, managed by its own Directorate S staff within the
First Chief Directorate. KGB officers cleared to work in this highly
secretive unit were known as ‘Line N’, and such individuals were singled
out for special attention by hostile intelligence agencies precisely because
they only handled illegals.

Because I answered to Kalugin in Directorate K, my contacts were

limited to his ‘Line KR’ staff, but as I had not been assigned a case
officer at the rezidentura upon my arrival in India, Shebarshin must have
wondered about the extent of my knowledge, and the degree to which his
apparatus was endangered. I can only speculate about this because I never
had the opportunity to discuss it with him but, according to Vasili
Mitrokhin, my KGB file shows that a review was undertaken of my work
over the past five years by Directorate K, and it concluded that I had

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provided material ‘of significant operational interest’, and had been
entirely honest in my dealings with the KGB. On that basis the Chairman,
Yuri Andropov, had given his approval for me to be reinstated.

It was not until May 1978 that I was summoned to Moscow to be

told that I had been reactivated and that I was to prepare for a new, long
assignment, after which I would be free to marry Nellie. She then joined
me in June, and stayed with me at the Hotel Rossiya for a month.

During this period I worked for the Second Chief Directorate,

ostensibly working as an editor for the Soviet Press, but was deployed
against a British Embassy secretary with a homely figure, codenamed
ERICA, who had gained quite a reputation in Moscow as being keen for
male company, but was suspected of being a honey trap by the KGB. I
was reluctant to go to work against her, but in the circumstances I felt I
had little choice in the matter, and I decided the most expedient solution
was to report that my efforts had failed, although I am sure our
relationship could have blossomed. Our relationship was short-lived
because I arranged for her to terminate it in the social club at the
embassy, where our spat could be witnessed by plenty of Soviet staff and
visitors. My rather cruel solution was to tell her that I had heard she had
been a carrier of a venereal disease, and not surprisingly she slapped me
and stormed out of the club. After that episode it was not difficult to
persuade the Second Chief Directorate that ERICA did not find me
attractive. Thus, rather neatly, I avoided compromising any British
targets.

My KGB contacts seemed unconcerned about my failure to win

ERICA’s heart, and I came under some pressure from my handlers to

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become a Soviet citizen. There were hints that I was to be offered a post,
previously fulfilled by Kim Philby who was in failing health, preparing
KGB personnel for life in the west prior to their postings overseas. In
anticipation of this I underwent a series of rigorous medical and
psychological examinations which included lie-detector tests, hypnosis
and being drugged. This was quite routine, and similar tests had been
administered after my return from each major mission.

My task, if I was to succeed Philby, was to provide the KGB with a

finishing school for KGB personnel who had completed their university
and KGB instruction course, and had mastered English. Kim Philby had
given an additional polish to those destined to work in the west, and I
was to supply them with information to about the English way of life,
covering habits, foibles, superstitions and such simple things such as how
to buy a bus or train ticket, and how to approach people in the street. I
even described how to behave at a Masonic gathering and gave them the
advantage of knowing basic Masonic signals. Much of the advice, of
course, was fairly rudimentary: not to cross a road against a red light,
don’t push into the front of queues, behaviour that was just unacceptable
to Brits, but quite customary in Moscow.

I hear that Philby had suffered constant and increasing ill-health,

and the number of his classes had been reduced from five days a week, to
four, three, and then one, and finally only the day when he felt up to it. I
was asked to take over, and learn the technique, initially at Philby’s knee.
This offer came at the end of my medical tests, during which I had seen
psychiatrists and psychologists, and the only thing found wrong with me
was a diagnosis that I had developed into a 'clinically recognised'
psychopath. By this time General Kalugin and my handler Nick had been

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moved on, as a result of an internal KGB power struggle, and had been
replaced by Andrei, whom I called Andrew.

At the end of my medical and psychological tests I was drugged

and hypnotised, and finally informed that I had passed the examination
with flying colours. Andrei told me that I had done very well, and now
had a new entry on my personal file, which would do me a lot of good. I
listened with great interest and anticipation as Andrew told me with a
laugh that I was a clinically recognised, controlled psychopath. I was
shocked, to be associated with all those terrible criminal psychopaths in
recent British criminal history, but Andrei explained that this was not
what was meant. The word ‘controlled’ meant only that I could switch
off my conscience and not be plagued by feelings of guilt, remorse or
shame, which might, it was feared, compel me into going back to
England and confessing all. The KGB management had an innate fear of
defectors, and was very conscious of what had happened to Nikolai
Khokhlov, the KGB assassin in West Germany who had been sent to kill
two emigré Ukrainians with a gas gun. After his first murder he had
knocked on the door of the second target, confessed all, and asked him to
call the police to come and arrest him. Since that embarrassing disaster
the KGB had not employed other Russians for such tasks. As Andrei
explained, Russians are a superstitious race and, combined with their
Orthodox religion, are plagued with a conscience destining them to hell if
they do anything wrong.

When I remarked that the psychological diagnosis sounded

terrible, Andrei insisted that, on the contrary, it was not possible to have a
better assessment in the file for ‘our sort of work’. He explained that
henceforth the KGB would have no problem assigning such jobs because

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I would go through with them and never suffer a pang of fear or
conscience, either at the time or later. ‘Being a controlled psychopath
only makes you a very cool customer, as you British would put it’. This
verdict rather reminded me of Sean Connery’s portrayal of James Bond, a
perfect portrait of a conscience-free spy. Undoubtedly my excitement
came from the adrenalin rush I get from going into dangerous situations,
and acknowledged that I was indeed obsessive about injustices, real or
imagined, very vengeful, and prepared to go anywhere and do anything
to get even. However, I was not hot-blooded and, as the Mafia is reputed
to say, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

I never met Philby formally but I did bump into him once at the
Hotel Ukrainia where he was collecting some English papers and
magazines, kept for him for him there at the hotel kiosk on a standing
order. We eyed each other warily, but said nothing. When I asked at the
kiosk for some English magazines, of the kind I had seen him collect, I
was told there were none left for sale, and all had been reserved,
unavailable to the general public, and kept under the counter.

Nevertheless, I did benefit from Philby’s cast-offs, and his copies

of The Times with the crosswords filled in. I also received, through the
KGB, his old Times Literary Supplements of which he lent me a huge
stack of back numbers, and these became my main reading matter while
in Moscow. My dream was that one day a copy of The Times would be
brought to me with the blank spaces where Philby had been unable to
solve the clues. I fantasized that by hook or by crook, I would find the
answers, even if they took me an entire day, and quietly return the paper
to him, thereby ‘wiping his eye’. Unfortunately my ambition was never
realised and I was told by our mutual handler that Kim used to pick up

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the paper, turned straight to the crossword and fill it in almost
immediately, often while talking simultaneously about his day’s diary of
engagements. He would be listening to Nick at the same as doing the
crossword, and this so impressed him that Nick asked me to check the
crossword and see if it had indeed been completed corrected. Clearly he
suspected that Philby had just filled it in with gibberish, which was
typical of the KGB, but unfounded.

Once, when asked by Nick how he could complete such difficult

puzzles so quickly, with only half his mind on the task, Philby had said
that he had been doing them for so long that he recognised the various
compilers, whom he now regarded as old friends. He claimed he could
identify each from the very first clue, and this advantage helped him sort
out the answers. He was, of course, a supremely clever man.

The plan for me to take over Philby’s training responsibilities came

to nothing, chiefly because of the extraordinary events that overtook
Kalugin. As far as I was concerned, Kalugin had been posted, somewhat
unexpectedly, to Leningrad, thus depriving me of a useful supporter at
court, but behind the scenes there were some dangerous manoeuvrings
that I only became aware of when, during the course of my psychological
tests in the autumn of 1979, I was asked some very odd questions about
my relationship with the counter-intelligence chief. Had I taken money
abroad for him? Did I know of any foreign bank accounts held by him?
Had I signed any chips for money that I had not actually received? These
queries made no sense to me at the time and of course I maintained that
my friendship with Kalugin was perfectly proper at all times, and that he
had never asked to me do anything for him abroad on the sly. I did not
connect this particular line with Kalugin’s departure from Moscow, but it

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later emerged that his political activities had made him very unpopular
with the KGB’s senior management, and he had fallen out with Vladimir
Kryuchkov. Typically, Kalugin’s dissent had been investigated as
possibly evidence of something much more sinister, and I must have
looked like a link to the west. In the end, of course, Kalugin retired from
the KGB in February 1990, and in September the same was elected to the
Duma, as the member for Krasnodar, and an outspoken critic of the
system. Finally he emigrated to the United States and was convicted in
his absence of treason, a completely trumped-up charge manufactured by
his many enemies. However, as far as I was aware, the atmosphere in
Moscow had deteriorated, and when I went back to Sofia I found myself
disconnected, suspended from further operations until the KGB mole
hunters had been satisfied. Although this was an uncomfortable few
months, with little money, I did have Nellie to share the hardship with,
and I was always confident that, once the enquiry had been completed, I
would be cleared and given another assignment. However, this turn of
events had been unsettling, and I scarcely knew how to interpret the
apparently contradictory signals. On the one hand I seemed to have been
accused of infiltrating the KGB, and maybe colluding with Kalugin,
whereas I had also been asked to take Soviet citizenship, the implication
being that I might not be able to leave the country again.

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 Chapter V
Australia

My visit to Australia in October 1978, which lasted until April 1979, on

one of my last missions for the KGB, was memorable, not least because I
learned that my method of acquiring and travelling on false passports was
rather more efficient than the KGB’s. By that time I was experienced in
operating under several different identities. The Second Chief Directorate
had issued me with a French Canadian passport in the name of Jean-
Jacques Baudouin which was for use only in Moscow, initially when I
was targeted against two British girls, but I returned it at the conclusion
of each assignment. I think it had been stolen some time in 1974, but it
was unconvincing, not least because I was described as being five feet
five inches tall, blue-eyed with blond hair, and I was supposed to it to
pursue VERA. Nevertheless, despite these discrepancies, I also used it to
attend a World Organic Chemistry conference, which was part of my
cover although knew absolutely nothing about the subject. I could find no
books in the field, but I did have a friend, a blonde Intourist guide whom
I had picked up at a hotel in Moscow. Our friendship had started very
casually, until she had invited me back to her flat where I had been
introduced to her your son. Later, after he had gone to bed, and she had
explained that her husband was in prison for black-market offences, and I
stayed with her for several nights. She was very well connected among
the university staff in Moscow, and she knew an academic who was a
chemistry expert. The friend turned out to be very knowledgeable, and
she gave me a smattering of the science, allowing me gain a grasp of the
subject as I lay between them. Our relationship continued until the
guide’s husband was released from prison, and I made one last visit to

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her apartment to give her son a state-of-the-art video game that was
unobtainable outside the hard currency shops from which ordinary
Muscovites were excluded. On that occasion her husband had welcomed
me into their apartment like a long-lost brother and we had gone to the
country for a barbecue and day of picking wild mushrooms. It was a
lovely, unforgettable day and made me appreciate how delightful
ordinary Russians can be, in contrast to the hustlers and careerists who
dominated so many of the Soviet institutions, the KGB included.
Nowadays, of course, such leeches are to be found in the criminal, mafia
gangs that prey on foreign visitors, but the warmth and generosity of the
orfinary folk match any welcome anywhere else in the world.

I also had six other genuine British passports, including one in the
name of John Arthur Phillips, with a Bulgarian passport in the same
name, but that identity was for use only in Bulgaria. In addition I
collected quite a few other identities issued to me by Marcel for
mercenary jobs, for I never went on more than one mercenary job with
the same identity.

My usual alias, as supplied by the KGB, was ‘Raymond Everett’,

whose passport application in Australia had been verified by a
respectable English businessman, a certain John Freeman. I had adopted
this unusual methodology because I had no confidence at all in the
original Everett passport that had been forged by the KGB, and
supposedly had belonged to a child who had died during the Second
World War. Even the KGB had little faith in it because I was instructed
to dump it once I had used it to reach Auckland via Tokyo on Japanese
Air Lines, and to fly on to Australia on the Everett birth certificate only.
Naturally I ignored these orders but in Sydney I had to go through

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Australian immigration, where I acquired an entry stamp on the phoney
Everett passport. Fortunately the official merely noted some details from
it, and then waved me through. I knew that if he had been equipped with
an ultra-violet scanner the rather crude forgery would have been spotted
instantly. Indeed, the principal objective for my visit to Australia was to
acquire a further identity and establish myself as an Australian citizen
because I was concerned that ‘John Freeman’, the big game hunter from
Africa, was becoming a little too notorious among the ladies of the
American diplomatic community.

One of my tasks during my travels was to acquire authentic

passports for use by other KGB agents. This procedure required some
skill, but I was adept at it and during my visit to Australia I made twenty
separate applications for different passports, of which I collected twelve
and gave them to my KGB handler in Canberra, with the other eight
going directly to other addresses, or were collected by others. At that
time I was living in Sydney in two places under different identities, both
supported by passports, in the names of Freeman and Everett. My method
of applying for passports under false names, was to telephone the issuing
office with a chasing enquiry after two or three days, and arrange for a
note to be attached to the Passport Office file, requesting that the passport
be sent another address as the applicant was about to go away on a trip.
This was a useful way of covering one’s tracks, and allowed me to carry
on my business undetected.

Certainly I was never caught, although following Mitrokhin’s

disclosures some enquiries were conducted in Australia, and one of my
contacts, Margaret, was interviewed by the authorities. Mitrokhin’s
version implies that I just went off with $8,000 by various routes just to

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spend months in New Zealand and then moved on to Australia just to
besiege a girl with a moustache, so she would sign my passport photo,
but the truth is rather different. The entire mission cost the KGB around
$23,000, with some $8,000 spent on airfares. Margaret is the manageress
of a travel agency based at an office very close to the flat I was renting,
and it was through her that I made most of my plane reservations. Our
relationship was strictly business, and legitimate, and I never needed her
to support my many passport applications which depended on Forsyth’s
system. I would go to a town where a young child had died and
photograph the local landmarks so as to a good background to support the
eventual ‘legend’ used by a KGB spy to back-stop his identity. These
were the Soviet ‘illegals’ whom I also helped in advance of their mission
when, prior to their main assignment, they would travel to New Zealand
to become acclimatised and gain a proficiency with the language. Then
they would move on to Australia and settle somewhere like Bondi Beach
where there was a local Russian Jewish community. In my case, John
Freeman rented an apartment in North Bondi, while Everett maintained a
flat on the beach!

The passports were for sixteen year-olds but the applications were to
be taken up for eighteen and nineteen year-old year graduates, often from
Moscow University, who would then enrol in suitable courses, such as
Russian language and literature in Australia. Occasionally there were
requests for passports for older people, sometimes up to the age of fifty,
and doubtless the older ones were for future ‘marrying Romeos’. In many
cases, the prior research on who was dead had been completed already,
but even then I visited the relevant town to check if the boy’s family was
still living in the same family home. In such circumstances it is quite
impossible to guarantee the security needed by the illegal, so I always

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looked for a fairly common name, often associated with orphans and
illegitimate children given to institutions by their single mothers. I
learned that the person previously employed on this not especially
demanding task had been lazy and had simply visited the nearest
cemetery, usually close to the local bus or railway station, taken the
details of two or three children, often the first that had come into view,
nearest the gate, and that was all I had to work on. I would rarely use
these names and instead I would research the local Catholic children’s
home, and then visit the nearest cemetery. I went everywhere to find he
right names and research their backgrounds. Sometimes I did this in a
tourist bus, accompanied by an unsuspecting Margaret and we would
stop at restaurants and meet people, developing good contacts while
simultaneously strengthening my own legend. Invariably at any stop
there would be a whole troupe of passengers wandering off all over the
place, perfect cover for drifting into cemeteries with a couple of
carnations. I could ask locals, who might also be on the bus as internal
tourists, who would be happy to chat about ‘whatever happened to Mrs
Musslewhite?’ Often there would be folk travelling home who were only
too happy to chat about their neighbours, all good background for
building up a legend. Understandably the KGB did not want to send a
Russian there to undertake such work as he would never have gained the
confidence of such people. Nor would the KGB allow a member of the
local rezidentura to do it as there was a fear that it might give a potential
defector too much information, perhaps enough to secure a deal at some
future date with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
(ASIO). Such fears were far from groundless, following the defection in
1954 of Vladimir Petrov from the Soviet embassy in Canberra.

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 Whenever I was seconded to other KGB departments for
temporary assignments it was made clear to me that everything I learned
on these posting was not just secret, but reserved for specifically that
department only. When my handler said I was to be attached to a
particular department, he never told me anything about the future job,
because he personally knew nothing, and when I returned on completion
no-one ever showed any curiosity about what I had been doing or where I
had been. This was a very strict application of the ‘need-to-know’
principle, so when I returned to Canberra and reported to my handler
with whatever passport I had obtained, I followed the instructions I had
received in Moscow by placing the passport in a strong brown envelope,
sealing it with Sellotape, and then signing across the seals. This meant
that even my handler had no need to know the identity that eventually
would be attached to the photograph. Nor was the hand-over a simple
procedure, for it was accompanied by the usual tradecraft of a signal at a
designated site, followed by a rendezvous at a prearranged meeting place,
or merely a dead letter drop. In either case, it was highly efficient.

On one occasion, as described inaccurately by Mitrokhin, I was

faithful to my cover to the point that I took temporary refuge in a
Salvation Army hostel. The real reason for this was not because I was
truly destitute, but because I had applied to the British High Commission
for a new passport in the name of John Freeman, claiming that the
original had been lost when my wallet had been stolen in Sydney,
together with all my travel documents. I needed a new passport because
my Freeman original was in Moscow, and anyway did not contain an
entry visa. I had also ditched the unsatisfactory Everett passport, and
reporting a theft was the most expedient way of obtaining an authentic
replacement, and explaining its lack of an entry stamp. To make the

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request authentic I checked into the hostel, where I received a new valid
passport. Ostensibly this John F. Freeman was a businessman, a partner
in the firm based in Accra, Ghana, and I was able to use the new passport
to draw some thousands of dollars from a bank account in Senegal and
give myself a measure of security that was profoundly lacking in the
Everett document. The incentive for the unplanned identity switch were
the notes taken upon my arrival by the immigration officer, for I was
concerned that the slightest check, perhaps on the number, with the
authorities in England, would reveal it to be a forgery. Why travel on a
dodgy false passport when the real thing is available?

My mission to Australia was not restricted to manufacturing false

identities, and I undertook several other tasks, including making some
very sensitive enquiries about individuals who, for one reason or another,
had lost contact with Moscow. Some were genuine Australian citizens
who had simply moved homes and not given a forwarding address, and
of these a few were people running safe houses, boarding houses, retired
Romeos, or former Eastern Europeans who had escaped from
Communism and needed to be reminded of their relatives still behind the
Iron Curtain. My job was to track such people down because they were
not allowed to retire, duck down and disappear. I merely made inquiries
and, when successful, relayed the information to Moscow by means of
secret writing in the regular mail sent to a specific address.

My return to Moscow from Australia proved to be quite eventful as I

was given a further mission on the way back. I was to stop off in
Singapore and make contact with a woman working at the German
Embassy who was of interest to the KGB. Once again, I found my quarry
and completed my assignment as instructed, but there was an incident

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that made me concerned about my future. I had been waiting for my new
girlfriend in a local bar when I noticed that I had become the object of
some attention from a group of what looked to me like about ten
extremely tough Australians, real descendants of Ned Kelly. These were
no sophisticated diplomats, of the kind one might expect to meet in a
Commonwealth country, but more resembled squaddies, perhaps troopers
of the Australian SAS, who had me in their sights. Had word circulated
too widely about my activities? Were their glances towards me an
indication that I might be under surveillance, or maybe that that I was
becoming unnecessarily paranoid? It occurred to me that if I was right, it
was time to move on before I pushed my luck too far, and if I was wrong
then I was reaching the end of my usefulness by imaging spooks around
every corner. Either way, I was approaching middle-age and burn-out,
and this encounter with Crocodile Dundee and his mates prompted me to
begin to think seriously about changing my life.

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 Chapter VI

London

In the autumn of 1979, having been twice offered the prize of Soviet
citizenship, I had flown to Sofia, only to be recalled to Moscow to
undergo a cross-examination at the KGB headquarters. It became clear to
me that I was the interrogators objective, but their true target was Oleg
Kalugin. I was certainly not going to participate in any such exercise and
when I made this clear I was allowed to return to Bulgaria, although I
now realised that I had no future in Moscow, and probably not much in
Sofia, so it was time to leave. I had really fallen in love with Nellie, and I
had no wish to continue screwing my way across the world. What had
seemed such an attractive way of life five years earlier was now an
increasing burden, to the point that I was beginning to lose interest in sex.
I felt that the KGB had taken me in the prime of my life and had abused
my body to the point that I was almost worn out. I was exhausted
mentally too, and I was also conscious that I was in danger of becoming
one of the best-known KGB agents in the world. A couple of incidents, in
Khartoum and Singapore, had persuaded me that the CIA probably knew
precisely who I was, and I was not so foolish as to think that my activities
could be expected to continue uninterrupted forever. I had received a
couple of warnings, and although I thought I recognised the signals, the
KGB had seemed impervious to them. They wanted to exploit my
remaining energy and vitality, and their shopping-lists seemed to be
growing longer. The problem was, I had not negotiated a retirement
clause in my non-existent contract of employment, and I knew that the
moment I voiced my unease I would be regarded not just as suspect, but

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possibly as a potential embarrassment and adversary. In those
circumstances I was not entirely confident that the KGB would allow me
to catch a flight home. Hitherto the KGB must have been sure of my
commitment becuase they had known I was a fugitive who had nowhere
else to run, but the situation in London had improved, or so I had
thought.

Perhaps a little too optimistically, I believed that with Moody and

Virgo in prison, no English court could rely on their investigation to
convict me of any crime. My optimism on this point was to prove
unfounded. I had also thought that the new Commissioner, Sir David
McNee, who had been brought down from Scotland in 1977 to continue
Mark’s reforms at the Yard, might be expected to take an interest in my
case, but this too turned out to be a forlorn hope. McNee, a Glaswegian
who had never served in London, and therefore had been uncontaminated
by working at the Yard, was known as ‘the Hammer’ and, as implied by
his nickname, was thought to be a hard man. Bob Mark had initiated the
clean-up, but he had been appointed an assistant commissioner in the
Met, from Leicester, back in 1967, and therefore must himself have
known of some of the shenanigans going on inside the CID. I had
expected that McNee would be interested in my dossier and that it might
represent a strong bargaining chip. It was with these happy thoughts in
my mind that I prepared to return to London and face the music, telling
Nellie only the bare minimum about my determination to get back to
England. It would be impossible for her to leave, and I knew the KDS
would haul her in for questioning when I disappeared,, so it was in her
interests that she should know as little as possible. Because she genuinely
knew very little about my activities, and was absorbed by her own work
at the Palace of Culture, her protests of innocence would have a definite

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ring of authenticity which any skilled interrogator would understand. As
for the KGB, they would undoubtedly be primarily concerned, not with
her, but with any knowledge I might have taken to trade with a western
intelligence agency. Without any other information to rely on, the KGB
would assume that I had become a defector and in those circumstances I
would be a marked man. I should not be caught attempting to leave the
country illegally and, once outside the Soviet Bloc, I would have to steer
clear of anywhere with a large Soviet diplomatic community.

Accordingly, my departure from Bulgaria was not entirely

straightforward, although I had the benefit of two passports. One was a
Bulgarian passport identifying me as John Arthur Phillips, born on 20
May 1926, but I had arrived in Sofia as ‘John Freeman’, with a three
month visa valid until 24 April. It was this document that I used to try
and cross the frontier into Romania, but I was turned back and told to
obtain a visa. My second attempt to leave on a train to Trieste, was more
successful, and having waved goodbye to Nellie at Sofia’s main train
terminal, I travelled to Venice, where I contemplated my future in St
Mark’s Cathedral.

In the silence of that magnificent church I realised that this was the
second time I had deserted the KGB. Whereas, on the first occasion, I
had been provoked into leaving India because of the treatment Nellie had
received from the KDS in Sofia, and had been able to justify my action, I
knew that this time I had really burned my bridges. The KGB might have
been tolerant of my first disappearance, but this time I could not count on
Oleg Kalugin to bale me out, and I would be in serious trouble if I went
back. London, I concluded, must be my objective.

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 I was aware that there was, of course, the outstanding warrant for
my arrest, now some eight years old, but I was also concerned about what
news of my more recent activities might have reached MI5. There had
been several defectors from the KGB and I wondered what lurid stories
they might have passed on about the FCD’s English spy. I had charges to
answer, but most could be dealt with, or so I believed. But what of any
allegations concerning espionage? I had not worked against British
interests, and had never compromised any classified information, so I felt
reasonably relaxed about the prospect of any charges under the Official
Secrets Act, but in the back of my mind there was a nagging concern
about the Treason Act which referred to giving comfort to the King’s
enemies and, as I recalled, was still on the Statute Book, along with arson
in His Majesty’s dockyards, as a capital offence. As a precaution, and to
bolster my dwindling funds, I called Barbara from Paris and asked her to
send me some money so I could come home, but she was very insistent
that certain things had happened, which could not be discussed on the
telephone, that I should know about before I returned. They were, she
assured me, extremely important, so we agreed to meet in Calais, but I
was baffled to know what she had been talking about. I had plenty of
time to consider the various options, and it occurred to me that perhaps
our meeting might be a trap, either for the police to nab me in France, or
an ambush by the press, or perhaps some other, even less palatable
explanation. Accordingly, I wrote a final letter to Nellie in Sofia, which I
knew would be intercepted by the KDS, and then set off for the ferry
terminal. There I watched from a distance and saw Barbara arrive, and
was horrified to see that she had brought our son Alex too. Our
arrangement was that she should come alone, and as I scanned the other
foot passengers, I thought I detected the telltale signs of surveillance. It
seemed to me that there were too many people hanging around aimlessly,

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and my instincts told me the risk of meeting her simply was not worth it.
Reluctantly, I kept them in view as they waited for me to turn up, and
then saw them go back to the ferry for the return journey.

I now contemplated the easiest and safest route back to London, to

Dublin and then up into Northern Ireland or across to Liverpool, but this
was a luxury I simply could not afford with my limited funds. Instead I
took the next ferry to Dover, was waved through immigration with only a
murmur of admiration for the number of visas in my passport, and then
made my way to Portsmouth where I contacted my brother Leonard at his
base at Middle Wallop. By the time I reached the bus station in
Portsmouth I was in a poor state, having had my briefcase stolen on the
ferry, and was exhausted from the nervous tension of the strange events
in Calais and my easy entry back into the country. Happily my brother
made me welcome and I stayed with him, his wife and two daughters
while I recovered my strength and made contact through him with my
mother in Romsey. She had been concerned about a rather nosy police
family in a neighbouring house, so I kept away from the house and was
reunited with her and my children at Leonard’s home.

I remained ignorant of what Barbara had been trying to warn me

about until I moved up to Sevenoaks where I stayed at a small country
house hotel run by an old friend, a former CID officer whom I trusted
implicitly. I arranged to meet Barbara again, and on this occasion
satisfied myself that she had come alone, and there was no possibility of
any entrapment or surveillance. She filled in many of the gaps in my
knowledge about what had been happening in England over the past eight
years, and told me that a private detective named George Devlin was
anxious to trace me because he needed evidence to discredit my former

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colleague Ian Harley. Apparently Harley had worked on a case of a major
property fraud in London, and Devlin’s client, a developer named
Pineles, had been accused of making off with £15m and had engaged a
well-known firm of solicitors, Noble & Co, and John Matthew QC, to
represent him. According to Barbara, Devlin knew that I would be able to
compromise Harley, and my witness statement had acquired a
considerable value. Her purpose in travelling to Calais had been to
convey Devlin’s offer, but the more I looked into the background, the
less I liked the sound of it. Initially John Matthew had worked for the
prosecution against Pineles, but later it seemed that when the case had
been dropped Matthew had retired, gone into private practice and helped
defend Pineles in a civil action to recover the lost millions. A hopelessly
heavy gambler, reputedly in debt to some notorious loan-sharks, he was
apparently keen to meet me in the hope of discrediting Ian Harley. But
how had he linked Harley to me? The connection proved to be yet
another hideous disappointment for me, for in a moment of indiscretion
Matthew had let slip that when he had worked on the original case
against me, Moody had shown him a previously undisclosed statement
signed by Harley. This was a man who had been my close friend and
neighbour, and named his son after me. To learn that Harley had secretly
turned against me and taken Moody’s side was a devastating blow and
ended what few illusions I had left about loyalty within the police. I had
known Harley well, and had dug him out of trouble on several occasions,
yet the man I would have trusted my life to had betrayed me. Worse, he
had helped Moody and remained silent about having done so. I had well
understood the savage ‘alpha male’ wolf pack syndrome where one-time
colleagues could be expected to turn on me to demonstrate their own
innocence, but this treachery was too hard even for me to stomach.
Certainly Harley had let me down badly, and now he would figure

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prominently in my updated dossier, but I had too many other
complications to deal with.

In April 1980 I finally telephoned my solicitor, Ben Birnberg, and

announced my intention to surrender to the authorities. My plan was to
give myself up but make contact with MI5 to negotiate a deal in which I
could receive an immunity in return for an account of my espionage over
the past eight years, and a detailed statement relating to corrupt officers
in the Met. However, making this proposal was not quite as easy as I had
anticipated. Birnberg knew nobody in the Security Service, and the route
to the new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, turned out to be far
from easy. Armstrong had seemed the right person to go to because,
constitutionally, he acted as the official link between the security and
intelligence services and the prime minister, and he had the added
advantage of having run the Home Office for the past three years as the
Permanent Under-Secretary. This would have given him a good
grounding in what had happened in the Met, and brought him into daily
contact with MI5’s Director-General, (Sir) John Jones, who would have
been quite unapproachable directly. At Birnberg’s suggestion we
consulted Gareth Peirce, and she advised that we talk to the Observer, a
paper that we presumed would be in touch with MI5 or the Cabinet
Secretary on a regular basis. In the meantime Birnberg and I turned up
one afternoon at the Old Bailey and announced ourselves to one of the
clerks who seemed reluctant to take me into custody and suggested I
return a few days later. Knowing that I had set quite a lot in motion, I
persisted, and eventually a copy of the original arrest warrant was found,
and I was remanded in custody by Judge Albert Clark to Brixton’s
hospital wing to await news of MI5’s reaction. My only consolation was
visits from Barbara, who was often accompanied by Barbara Windsor,

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the Carry On actress whose gangster husband, Ronnie Knight, was also
on remand, awaiting trial for armed robbery. Much later, Knight, who
also owned clubs in Soho, and his brother John were convicted of the
famous 1983 Security Express robbery which netted their gang £6m.

My offer to document my work for the KGB and reveal my

dossier on police corruption was made to the Security Service but, to my
surprise, it was turned down flat, without even an opportunity to show
what I was prepared to trade. Only later did I learn that MI5 had gone
straight to Scotland Yard to ask whether my allegations of widespread
corruption within the CID could be true. Not surprisingly, my former
colleagues condemned me as a fantasist, and I found myself facing a
lengthy prison sentence with no chance of bail. My other option, of
publicising my case, seemed fraught, but Jack Crossley of the Observer
suggested another approach, this time through the Attorney-General, Sir
Michael Havers, and I was visited in prison by one of his reporters, Bill
Thompson, to outline the material I could offer. Once again, the attempt
failed, and I found myself the object of attention from the Yard with
requests for interviews from detectives doubtless despatched by the new
ACC, Gilbert Kelland. I learned that far from having fallen victim to the
purges, eland had been instrumental in conducting them, and this was
another good reason for me to keep my distance from the Yard.

Much had changed in London during the eight years of my

absence, and as a result of evidence from Jimmy Humphreys and another
pornographer specialising in hard-core material, Gerald Citron, the lid
had been blown off Moody’s activities. In May 1974, during one of the
Mark purges, Citron had been convicted of possession of pornography
and fined £30,000, but instead of paying up, Citron had fled to the South

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of France, leaving behind a lengthy statement about police corruption in
Soho. Originally from Manchester, Citron had become a major supplier
to the Soho market, and had paid off the Dirty Squad like everybody else.
However, he had expected a measure of protection, and when Mark’s
new regime began to raid premises assumed to be immune, all bets were
off. Moody had been found to have had a half share in a porn shop in
Walker’s Court, managed by one of Silver’s men, Joey Jones, and the
number of number of people in the trade willing to implicate Moody and
Virgo escalated dramatically.

The imprisonment of Moody and Virgo in 1977 had transformed

the CID, and even with the passage of time it is hard to exaggerate the
impact their convictions had. Commander Virgo, for example, had served
on Lord Mountbatten’s enquiry into prison security, following the escape
of George Blake in 1966, and for years had exercised tremendous
influence at the Yard and in Whitehall. It had been his evidence at DCI
Vic Kelaher’s trial on conspiracy charges in September 1973 that had
ensured his acquittal when three of his subordinates in the Drugs Squad
were convicted of perjury. The picture that emerged of the Dirty Squad’s
grip on the very trade it was intended to suppress had astonished even the
most hardened and cynical. The Kelland enquiry showed that the Dirty
Squad had been collecting £250,000 a year, and before he committed
suicide in May 1975 the porn importer ‘Big Jeff’ Phillips gave lengthy
interviews to the Sunday People which had published several articles
detailing the symbiotic relationship between corrupt plain-clothes men
and Soho’s vice merchants. Stories of parties, hookers, holidays and
junkets were spiced with allegations of free cars and home improvements
for detectives, and suddenly the rumours that had circulated for years
were not only confirmed, but helped swing the pendulum of public

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opinion in the direction advocated by Lord Longford, who had chaired an
enquiry into pornography in 1972. The question for me to answer,
though, was whether this new environment would help or hinder my
case. On the one hand the revelations added weight to my dossier on
police corruption, but that advantage had to be balanced against the
widespread belief that most of the Met’s CID had been contaminated,
myself included.

The most serious of the charges against me concerned my three

meetings with Michael Perry, and with the maximum sentence being two
years’ imprisonment on each charge of conspiracy, I was looking at a
possible six years inside. The other charges were simply too spurious to
be pursued.

Robson and Harris had been convicted on the evidence of the tape
recordings which would be used against me, but I realised that I would
stand little chance of challenging their authenticity now that the Court of
Appeal had ruled in favour of their convictions. Four forensic experts had
shown the recordings to have been edited, but to declare the transcripts
unsafe now would have far wider implications, and I knew such a
strategy would be torpedoed at the outset. I also knew that I would be
lucky to get an early dismissal on the grounds of entrapment, as this
strategy had been deployed at the Robson and Harris trial, and the judge
had ruled against the defence.

I was to spend the next few months on remand in the segregated

cells of A Wing in HM Prison Brixton, which I shared with Makki
Hounoun Ali, the only terrorist to survive the SAS attack on the Iranian
Embassy at Prince’s Gate in May 1980. Ali was one of six members of

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the ‘Mujahaddin Anafar Martyr’ who had forced their way into the
building and held the twenty-six occupants hostage for six days before
the SAS stormed the building and shot dead five of the terrorists. Ali only
escaped with his life because in the confusion he had discarded his
weapons and had mingled with the hostages as they had been bundled out
of the burning building into the garden at the rear. The seizure of the
embassy had been planned in Baghdad in an attempt to draw attention to
the plight of Iraqis in the Iranian province of Arabistan, and they had
intended to negotiate their release, and certainly had not anticipated the
lethal intervention of the SAS.

I was just preparing myself for my trial when I saw that The Fall of
Scotland Yard by Barry Cox, John Shirley and Martin Short, which had
been published in 1977 and contained a very distorted account of what
purported to have been my corrupt activities, all highly prejudicial to my
case, had been reprinted and rushed out to coincide with the publicity
surrounding my unexpected reappearance in London. I had been shown a
copy of the book in Moscow when it had been first released three years
earlier, and as soon as I read the references to me I suspected that the
authors had been briefed by someone keen to keep me out of the country.
Most of the book concentrated on corruption at the Yard, but the version
of my role was highly distorted and implied that I was a master criminal.
A good example was the innuendo that on the night the Times story
appeared, I had telephoned a criminal named Ronald Williams to
intimidate him and ensure his silence. This was demonstrably untrue, but
had been one of the charges produced at the committal proceedings,
following the trawl through the underworld for other offences I might
have committed. In fact Williams was a career criminal who had been
one of Harley’s informants, and he had negotiated his release from prison

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on a Home Office license in return for his witness statement, made to one
of the gullible country coppers, implicating me. As soon as he gained his
freedom he went on a one-man crime wave and used his license as a get-
out-of-jail-free card whenever he was arrested. Finally, when he was
caught stealing the brass plate off a lawyer’s office the magic wore off
and he admitted his evidence had been a manoeuvre to leave prison. One
further charge documented in the book in some detail related to £15
allegedly received from Daniel Crouch, another of Harley’s informants
who was a member of the gang known as ‘the Likely Lads’. Crouch’s
evidence, as received by DCS Charles Naan of the Mid-Anglia
Constabulary, was that he had paid me to make a traffic summons
disappear, but once again, upon close scrutiny, his story disintegrated.
The reality was that a police motorcyclist had given Crouch a statutory
police form known as an HO/RT/1 (an abbreviation of Home
Office/Road Traffic Act document 1) which required the recipient to
present certain designated documents, such as a certificate of motor
insurance or a driving license, at a name police station within five days.
Detectives did not issue these forms, and they were processed exclusively
by the uniformed branch. It turned out that Harley had been a police
cadet with an officer named Shakespeare who worked in the processing
department and occasionally they ran a little fiddle which enabled them
to lose the process duplicate. One that copy had disappeared, the grateful
recipient could ignore the summons and no further action would be taken
because there was no record of a failure to produce the required
documents. This was a scheme run by Harley and Shakespeare, but was
nothing to do with me, and I had no knowledge of Crouch, who
apparently ran a whelk stall on the Old Kent Road. Once again, the
charge was based on fabricated evidence, and to make matters worse, the
version in The Fall of Scotland Yard suggested that the Met detectives on

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the Williamson enquiry had failed to trace the motorcyclist who had
issued the original form, whereas the country bumpkins had found him
with a couple of hours. The implication was that I had somehow used my
extensive influence among other corrupt officers at the Yard to suppress
a vital clue that was uncovered by the swedes. Plainly, the tale was
absurd, but the fact that it had reached the pages of the book showed that
someone was quite serious about using any tactic to deter me from
making an appearance. As for Crouch, I learned that he had been facing
thirty charges of shop-breaking and had applied for bail. Surprisingly, his
application had been granted and twenty-nine of the charges were
dropped in return for his witness statement.

In the light of the publicity the book attracted I successfully

petitioned to have my trial moved to the provinces, and eventually I
appeared before Mr Justice Angus Stroyan at Middlesborough Crown
Court, where I was prosecuted by a Crown counsel named Riblin on
three charges of having corruptly obtained £150 from a criminal. The
person identified in the court papers was, of course, Michael Perry, and I
was accused of having taken the money off him as a bribe to prevent him
from facing a charge of theft in the Nuneaton case. The evidence was a
tape recording made on 31 October, illegally, in a car, supported by two
other transcripts which, in their right context, should not have been
particularly incriminating.

The crux of the case was that back in September 1969 Frankie the
Barber had provided Perry with a completely bogus alibi for the
Nuneaton case, and it had been Moody who had travelled to see the
Warwickshire police to confirm that the Met had conducted the proper
enquiries in Camberwell and established the bona-fides of the spurious

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JP. In retrospect it was obvious that Moody had made the journey to
Nuneaton to protect himself because Frank Holbert worked for his friend
Bernie Silver, and any detailed investigation of Holbert could spill over
into what was happening in Soho and compromise Moody’s little
enterprise. In effect Moody had covered himself and ensured that if
anyone took any heat over the false alibi, it would be me. This became
quite obvious, and explained why Moody had joined the Williamson
enquiry, and why he had taken the trouble to take statements from the
Warwickshire police in 1970 when that task ought to have been
undertaken by officers drawn from provincial forces. The arrangement
that had allowed the Williamson enquiry to proceed was Sir John
Waldron’s insistence that only Met officers would interview Met
detectives, leaving the outsiders, drawn from Birmingham, Manchester
and other forces, to handle the provincial enquiries. Why had Moody
taken it upon himself to break the convention and rush off to Nuneaton?
The answer was now obvious, and Frankie Holbert, who supposedly had
been acting as one of Moody’s informants since 1958, held the key,
However, Frankie had died, supposedly having jumped off a balcony at
the block of flats in which he lived in Deptford in November 1973, hours
after he had been convicted on pornography charges. Did he really jump,
or was he pushed? Personally, I had no doubt about what had happened
because there were too many powerful people with too much to lose if
Frankie had decided to start talking about police corruption. Moody had
enriched dozens of very influential figures, inside and outside the Yard,
and none of them could have wanted Frankie to start making statements
He certainly did not possess the strength of character to kill himself and it
did not take much imagination to think of the circumstances in which he
could have been coaxed or coerced up onto a roof and then shoved over
the edge. It was certainly one of the most convenient and timely deaths of

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the era, and it had occurred to me that a similar fate could await me. If
this sounds fanciful, I reminded myself that I was accused, by men
making hundreds of thousands of pounds, of having received £50 from a
known criminal in a car. Moody was a dangerous man, with powerful
friends, and this knowledge had helped keep me away from England for
eight years.

Thus, when I came to trial, Moody was still in prison, Frankie the
Barber was dead and Michael Perry would be facing a perjury charge if
he failed to stick to his assertion that he had paid me £50 in October
1969, followed by another £50 a month later, for what had really been
Moody’s mischief.

My case got off to a bad start when my counsel, (Sir) Ivan

Lawrence QC MP, failed in his application to have the fourteen tapes
excluded from the prosecution’s evidence. Plainly the recordings had
been made illegally, and those presented were not even the originals, but
Lawrence’s submission failed to impress the judge, and I lost confidence
in him. This was such a fundamental plank of my defence that I reckoned
I might just as well conduct the rest of it myself. Five of the charges were
dropped, but I was convicted on the remaining two, relating the
allegation that I had extorted £150 from Perry, and was sentenced to two
years. In court to hear the verdict were a couple of Russians, who I
assumed had turned up to see if there was likely to be any embarrassing
revelations about my past contacts with the KGB, so they must have been
relieved when no word of that aspect of my past was mentioned.

After sentencing I had just six weeks to serve so, after a brief spell
at Durham, I was sent to Rudgate open prison near Newcastle, where I

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became acquainted with Joe Kagan, who offered to make contact with the
KGB for me, and then finally was transferred to Ford open prison for
release.

My past soon caught up with me because I was approached by a

firm of solicitors anxious to gather evidence about a currently serving
detective, a chief inspector, who had attempted to extort a large sum from
a property developer in Kensington. One of the parties had fled to Grasse
in the south of France, and the tenacious George Devlin had been
retained by John Matthew QC to go in pursuit of my old colleague Ian
Harley and two former detectives. The offer made to me was to pay for
my appeal if I supplied enough information on Harley, and may be set me
up in business, but I was not interested. However, my other approach
was, so I thought, rather more promising. It seemed that the Hertfordshire
Police had never quite given up their interest in corruption in the Met,
even though their contribution to Operation COUNTRYMAN had been
ridiculed as the futile efforts of provincial flatfoots seeking to root out
bad apples in London’s CID. I was invited to prepare a lengthy statement,
describing my encounters with senior officers such as Gilbert Kelland,
who had been appointed Assistant Commissioner (Crime) in 1977. I was
able to give a detailed account of the darker side of my ex-colleagues to
the head of the Hertfordshire CID, who was backed by his Chief
Constable when the time came to negotiate an immunity for my evidence,
which eventually amounted to a statement of 260 pages. My agreement,
endorsed by the DPP and the Attorney-General, was to absolve me of
involvement in any crime, short of violence, and in return I was entirely
candid in naming those whom I knew to have been on the take. I was
always somewhat sceptical about what this enquiry would achieve, and I
was proved to have been quite realistic, because all that I accomplished

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was the lifelong enmity of the Met which was now run by the very people
I had compromised. Not surprisingly, Scotland Yard took every
opportunity to deride my testimony and portray me as a fantasist, and
almost the only person to fall victim of my dossier was Ian Harley, the
Camberwell detective who had been the architect of most of my
problems.

I was always puzzled about why the Security Service never

bothered to interview me, after I had served my sentence, but the truth
was to emerge when Tom King’s Parliamentary Committee investigated
the background to Vasili Mitrokhin’s defection in June 2000. Mitrokhin
had been aggrieved at the way he had been handled following his
defection in 1992, and Tom King had criticised the officers who had
never bothered to pursue the leads I must have represented. Naturally I
was one of the first to buy a copy of The Mitrokhin Archive, but I was
disappointed by his account of my adventures because it was so
fragmentary and inaccurate. There I learned that my KGB codename had
been SCOT, which in Russian means ‘swine’ or ‘brute’, and that Nellie
had been ‘an agent of the Bulgarian intelligence service’. While the
information about my codename might have been true, it was the most
outrageous calumny to accuse Nellie, with whom I had been reunited in
2000 when she finally reached England, of having had any relationship
with the Bulgarian intelligence service. On the contrary, she had been a
victim of their harassment and later was to prove her loyalty and
commitment to me by becoming my wife.

Almost as soon as I had left Sofia Nellie had been visited by two
KDS officers who had demanded to know where I was, and she had told
them, quite simply, that I had gone to England. Soon afterwards they had

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returned, and on this occasion Nellie had shown them my letter from
France in which I had confirmed my intention to return to London. Most
likely they already knew the contents, as mail from the west was
routinely intercepted by the KDS, but instead of being hostile, the
officers had suggested that she might like to go to England and persuade
me to return. Nellie had turned the idea down, so the KDS had resorted to
other tactics, recruiting one of her friends, Vanga, as an informant in
November 1982. None too subtly Vanga had taken a close interest in
Nellie and she had realised her motives instantly. However, it was only
when I unexpectedly resumed contact with Nellie, in a telephone call a
month later, in December 1982, that she had anything to conceal. I flew
in to Sofia on 16 December, to be reunited with her, and over the next ten
days I told her the full truth for the first time, and she learned of what I
had been up to during the eight years of my association with the KGB, of
my police background, and my trial and imprisonment. Truly she had no
inkling of any of it, but the news had been a terrible shock for her so
when I left for the airport on Boxing Day I suspected I might never see
her again.

Curiously, the KDS appears not to have discovered my visit to

Sofia until after I had left for, once again, two officers had turned up
rather too late, anxious to know why I had returned. Equally inquisitive
was Valentin, my old handler from the Soviet embassy, whose
unexpected appearance proved that the KGB had not lost its interest in
me. I only heard about this unwelcome attention much later, but I
refrained from contacting Nellie because to do so might have placed her
in danger. Indeed, I did not hear from her until 1990 when, without any
warning, I received a birthday card postmarked in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

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Although the KDS had banned Nellie from any foreign travel, the
collapse of the Communist regime meant the restrictions were lifted, so
she had taken the opportunity to go on a university exchange and stay on
the campus in Newcastle. I was unaware of this, and heard nothing more
from her until the middle of September 1999, immediately following the
Mitrokhin disclosures. She had heard the story in Sofia where I had
acquired some celebrity, and having contacted the Daily Express, which
had published a photograph of me outside my flat in north London, had
written a letter addressed simply to ‘8 Holly Court’. Thanks to the
efficiency of the post office, this had indeed reached me, and the next
month I had been reunited with Nellie in Sofia. Indeed, I visited Bulgaria
again in November, and again in December when, at long last, we were
married. On 15 January we came back to England as man and wife, and
went to live with my younger brother in Nottingham.

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 Chapter VII
Mitrokhin

My exposure as a key KGB agent for eight years, as disclosed by The

Mitrokhin Archive, at least served one purpose, which was to embarrass
MI5, the organisation that had failed to take me seriously, but when I
read the pages describing my exploits, my jaw dropped and my blood
pressure rose. Much of the information in the account could not have
come, as alleged, from the KGB’s archives, and in the text it was hard to
distinguish between what was really Mitrokhin’s own version, and what
had been inserted by his editor, Christopher Andrew.

Although one of the leading intelligence historians of the period,

and the author of Secret Service in 1983, Andrew had come to his subject
late and his original doctorate had been gained in studying the history of
football. He was widely criticised when he belatedly drew the defector
Oleg Gordievsky into collaborating with KGB: The Inside Story, a
supposedly comprehensive history of the Soviet intelligence services
published in 1990, which was heavily dependent on secondary sources,
some of them quite unreliable. Indeed, Gordievsky’s role had not been
that of a co-author, but really as a source of confirmation for much of
what had been written already by Dr Andrew (who speaks no Russian),
long before the defector had joined the project. When Mitrokhin turned
up in London determined to publish his archive, speaking no English, and
with no understanding of what was already in the public domain in the
west, he clearly needed considerable support to transform his incomplete
manuscript and numerous volumes of disjointed hand-written notes into a
comprehendible narrative. The task was mammoth and was divided into
what amounted to four separate publications: a British and almost

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identical American volume, a French (Le KGB contre l’Ouest:1917-
1991) and German (Das Schwarzbuch des KGB) version of the same with
additional local cases; a KGB Lexicon published three years later to give
an insight into terms and phrases used by the KGB, and a final volume
which was to be heavily delayed. Apparently Mitrokhin had been
appalled to see that the American edition of his beloved Mitrokhin
Archive, which he had spent a quarter o a century compiling at immense
danger to himself, had been entitled The Sword and the Shield, with the
authors described as Christopher Andrew, in bold letters, ‘with Vasili
Mitrokhin’ in smaller letters underneath. Understandably, Mitrokhin had
felt aggrieved at this presentation of his life’s work, and complained
vociferously. When he was interviewed by the Parliamentary Intelligence
and Security Committee he made it clear that he ‘was not content with
the way in which the book was published’ and ‘wished he had had full
control over the handling of his material’. Although the co-authors may
have fallen out, my concern was the accuracy of what had been written
about me, and the doubt about precisely how much of the pages devoted
to my exploits really had originated from the KGB’s plundered files. As
well as the two opportunities for error, when Mitrokhin copied his
extracts, and then when his notes were translated into English, there was
also the possibility that the original material in the KGB files were
inaccurate. Certainly the information concerning me was quite detailed,
but that did not make it right, and some of it was undoubtedly plain
wrong, but how much? I was fascinated to learn that my Raymond
Everett alias had been codenamed FORST in the KGB’s archives, but
was that really true? There was no way of verifying much of the
information without access to the original records.

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 Whilst few could disagree that Mitrokhin’s goldmine represented
an unprecedented windfall for western intelligence agencies, it required
very careful handling while it was being refined and transformed from
his raw material into form that could be easily understood. Mitrokhin had
lost his access upon his retirement in 1984, shortly before the world of
counter-intelligence was to be turned upside-down by the decision of
Aldrich Ames, in April 1985, to betray the CIA’s list of moles in
Moscow. Thus Mitrokhin was never in a position to learn about Ames’s
treachery, nor to compromise the KGB’s star spy in the FBI, Robert
Hanssen, who had first volunteered information to the GRU in New York
in 1979. After selling three batches of classified documents to the KGB’s
rivals, he had withdrawn from the scene until he re-established contact
with the Soviets, in Washington DC, in June 1986, but this time he dealt
with the KGB, and even then he went to considerable lengths to conceal
his true identity and even the fact that he was an FBI counter-intelligence
officer. Thus when Mitrokhin retired in 1984 he knew nothing about
either Ames or Hanssen, but nor did he ever see the file of the KGB’s
other important spy, John Walker, who had been handled by the 16th
Department, a self-contained, specialist unit within the FCD
concentrating on signals intelligence. Unusually, the 16th Department
maintained their own compartmented archive to which Mitrokhin never
had access. Accordingly, although Dr Andrew included plenty of
references in his book to Ames and Walker, they were actually
completely unknown to Mitrokhin. Hanssen, of course, was not to be
caught until February 2001, long after the publication of The Mitrokhin
Archive, and there was no mention of George Trofimoff either, who was
not to be arrested until June 2000. That, of course, is not to diminish the
significance of Mitrokhin himself, or his documents, and there is no
question that it was a tip from him that finally entrapped Robert Lipka,

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the KGB’s nineteen year-old spy inside the National Security Agency
who had been active for two years until he left the NSA in August 1967
to attend college, having been paid $27,000 for more than fifty bundles of
secret documents he had been asked to take to the shredder. In short,
Mitrokhin was of great historical interest, but he did not actually identify
any of that most valuable of commodities, spies currently active. Lipka
had cut off all contact with the KGB in 1974, and Trofimoff had retired
from the US Army Reserve in 1987. Both men received long prison
sentences after they had been videotaped boasting of their espionage to
undercover FBI Special Agents, but Mitrokhin’s evidence on its own fell
far short of what was required to secure criminal convictions. It required
extremely sensitive handling, and the omission of Trofimoff’s case from
The Mitrokhin Archive was simply that, at the time of publication, the
investigation was still ongoing.

In common with most intelligence agencies, there is often an

element of both fact and fiction in the KGB’s files, and this does not
necessarily mean that the files were compiled by case officers with
malevolent intent. There can be differences in perception, and the lines
between an unconscious source and a willing agent is sometimes hard to
determine, and even harder to explain if a subject is attributed a
codeword which might imply he or she was a fully-fledged spy, whereas
they might not have been anything more than a casual acquaintance. In
my case such delicacies did not concern me because of course I had
always been a willing agent from the outset. However, my doubts about
the veracity of Mitrokhin’s version increased when I learned that of the
thirteen footnoted source references to me, all from more than forty
paragraphs devoted to me in ‘Volume 5, Chapter 14’ of the defector’s
notes, none were available for independent scrutiny, either in their

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original form or as photocopies. Then there was the issue of the
chronology described in Mitrokhin’s account. According to his version, I
had marched into the Soviet embassy in Rabat to offer my services, but
that was untrue. Did this assertion appear in the KGB file or in
Mitrokhin’s notes, or was it supposition on the part of Professor Andrew?
Then I had been recruited as the KGB’s ‘first British Romeo spy’ and
‘posted to Bulgaria’ to cultivate suitable targets, with ‘the wife of an
official in an FRG government department’ as my ‘most important sexual
conquest’. In reality, of course, I had met Nina entirely casually, while I
was recuperating from malaria, and the idea that I had been deployed to
seduce her was laughable. But again, was this material reproduced
faithfully from Mitrokhin, or was it another example of Dr Andrew
joining up the dots and drawing a completely false picture?

The other incidents described by Andrew were equally misleading,

and his version had me blundering around Australia, whereas I completed
the mission without any mishaps. With one finger in the source notes,
and the other following the text, I read that I had been a corrupt detective
‘in the pay of criminals such as south London gang boss Charlie
Richardson’, and that while awaiting trial I had gone ‘into hiding for
several months’ and then had used a false passport in the name of John
Freeman, supposedly my ‘girlfriend’s mentally handicapped brother’ to
flee abroad, finally approaching the KGB at the Soviet embassy in Rabat
in August 1972. Every detail of Mitrokhin’s version was an absurd
travesty, and I certainly was never in hiding before I left for Morocco.
Indeed, I had been in constant contact with my colleagues at Camberwell
police station who, with typical generosity, had arranged a regular whip-
round for me, organised by Colin Crisp. Several officers, including
Michael Smith and Peter Lang had been frequent visitors at my house,

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and of course during those two and a half years awaiting trial I had also
been in direct touch with my co-defendants, Robson and Harris.
Although I had briefly known Eddie Richardson as a young man, Of
course, I had absolutely no connection with the Richardson gang beyond
working on the edge of the police investigation, like many hundreds of
other Met detectives. Of course I did obtain the Freeman passport, but not
until long after my departure from England, a journey for which I had
used my own passport. As for Barbara’s brother being mentally
handicapped, the idea is absurd. He spent twenty years working for
British Rail and then had another career with Westminster City Council,
a total of forty years of exemplary service without a single of sick leave,
and certainly no mental problems.

For good measure, Dr Andrew claimed that my photo in the

Freeman passport application had been ‘authenticated by the mistress of a
member of the Richardson gang’. Was this embellishment in Mitrokhin’s
files, or had it been added by Dr Andrew?

Another bizarre assertion was that I had ‘made the dramatic claim
that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence, regularly bribed
Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Met “to smooth over certain
unpleasantness”. Once again, this was sheer invention, only on this
occasion I could see how it might have been possible for some ignorant
KGB officer to have confused DS Harley’s name with that of the Labour
politician, although I thought it unlikely. In any event, the context was
completely wrong, although I do admit that in Moscow I often sounded
off about the injustice I had suffered at the hands of Moody and his
cronies. Certainly Moody was corrupt and was shown at his trial to have
been bribed by many, but as far as I knew there had not been any

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politicians involved. Nevertheless, this example strongly suggested that
poor transliteration may have been a factor in building a ridiculously
inaccurate account of my activities. No wonder that Mitrokhin himself
had been so disappointed with the eventual publication. He had wanted
his life’s work to be an unchallengeable history of Soviet misdeeds, not a
compendium of inaccurate tales of espionage.

The most wounding of all the tripe attributed to Mitrokhin was the
assertion that Nellie had been ‘an agent of the Bulgarian intelligence
service’. This was not only a complete fabrication, but was really very
hard for Nellie to endure for she had been victimised by the KDS because
of her relationship with me, and for her to be smeared in this way was
intolerable. The impact on her, and her family in Sofia, a city then
recovering from years of Communist repression, had been devastating. In
the post-Zhivkov era, it is hard to imagine a more damaging and
potentially dangerous charge than one of having collaborated with his
hated security apparatus. Although Zhivkov himself had been deposed in
1992 and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, he had been in power
since 1954 and there were plenty of people about with scores to settle,
real or imagined. To be labelled a KDS agent in the atmosphere
prevailing at the time was extremely hazardous, even for one’s friends.
Irritatingly, Dr Andrew agreed under pressure from lawyers to remove
this passage from future editions when Nellie complained, but never
apologised for what was an entirely gratuitous falsehood that had created
appalling problems for her family. His reluctance to correct an obvious
injustice, and his refusal to show us Mitrokhin’s original notes left me
deeply suspicious of the authenticity of the rest of The Mitrokhin Archive.

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 Chapter VIII
HOLA

Having read the Mitrokin account of my case, I really wondered about

the accuracy of the rest of the book. He claimed that, as the KGB’s
archivist, he had smuggled scraps of paper out of the headquarters over a
period of twenty years, and then had reconstructed entire operational
files. If his version of my file was anything to go by, the rest of the
material was deeply suspect, although occasionally one could see how
either he or his SIS interpreters had misconstrued people and events. For
example, Mitrokhin claimed that one of the women I had targeted in
India had been an Israeli, but this clearly was a misunderstanding, for the
Bronfman girl was a Jewish Canadian, not an Israeli. Was this another
piece of embroidery, poor transliteration or sheer fabrication?

Part of my irritation at the references to me in The Mitrokhin

Archive concerns the revelation, made to the Parliamentary Intelligence
and Security Committee, that when the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm
Rifkind, orignally had authorised the publication project in March 1996,
he had imposed certain very strict conditions on the public release of the
material where living people might be identified by name, noting that ‘it
would be grossly unfair if unproven allegations were published with our
agreement’. He was also emphatic that the decision to include any names
should not be left to the Security Service. As a lawyer and a politician,
Rifkind anticipated the impact of unsubstantiated accusations of
espionage, and doubtless the publisher’s legal advisers would have given
similar advice, but Rifkind effectively imposed a ban on naming
individuals who had not been convicted of espionage. He was quite
correct to do so, and he had been equally right to prevent MI5 from

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taking the initiative in denouncing individuals never charged with any
crime. Within the Whitehall system, MI5 is a curious hybrid because
although the organisation and its director-general are accountable to the
Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, they are not instruments of
political power in the same way that the country's other intelligence
agencies are. The Director-General of the Security Service heads a semi-
autonomous body and has surprisingly wide discretion, within the terms
of the legislation passed since 1989, to open files and conduct
investigations without consulting ministers, and undertake independent
analysis. This is in stark contrast to the relationship between the Secret
Intelligence Service which responds to requirements set by the Joint
Intelligence Committee (JIC), which then uses analysts from its own
Assessment Staff to collate the product and distribute reports. It is in this
rather unusual constitutional arrangement that ministers are necessarily
hesitant about extending MI5 even greater freedom, and Rifkind had
wisely anticipated the potential pitfalls of having the organisation
sponsor, on behalf of the government, the identities of people named by a
Soviet defector as traitors, or even entirely innocent targets of Soviet
interest. If Mitrokhin had wanted to publish his book independently,
without official assistance, he would have been free to do so, subject to
the UK's laws of defamation, and the European Convention on Human
Rights, but instead he had opted to collaborate with the government,
which was an entirely different matter. Quite properly, governments are
reluctant to be drawn into the libel courts, especially in cases where the
principles of Crown immunity would not apply. Rifkind's wise injunction
had been intended to protect the innocent implicated by Mitrokhin, and
avoid legal controversy.

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 Somehow, as it turned out, Rifkind's prohibition had not extended
to me, although I had not acted against British interests and, on the
contrary, had been granted a formal immunity from prosecution by the
Director of Public Prosecutions in 1984. Somehow this important detail
also had been omitted from the final text of The Mitrokhin Archive, and I
was thrown to the media wolves. I was especially irked by this uneven
treatment because a Tribune journalist, codenamed DAN, was described
as the London rezidentura’s ‘most reliable agent of influence during the
1960s’, yet his true identity was initially concealed, at least until some
assiduous researchers challenged Dick Clements, a political adviser to the
Labour Party leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. Clements had
edited Tribune for twenty years and, according to Mitrokhin, had been
recruited by the KGB in 1959 and had done their bidding for years
afterwards. With his wide readership and very considerable political
influence, he had been regarded by the KGB as a vital asset, and MI5 of
course would have been fully aware of DAN's real name and status yet,
curiously, he had benefited from Rifkind’s ruling, whereas I had not. I
had never been accused of espionage in Britain, or spying against British
interests, yet here was someone said to have been paid by the KGB to
publish Soviet propaganda, and had been protected. Like Richard Gott,
the Guardian journalist exposed by Oleg Gordievsky in December 1994,
Clements had peddled Soviet propaganda at the KGB’s request, but of
course had never been in a position to compromise any classified
material (and thereby breach the Official Secrets Act). Nevertheless, he
did admit to having had meetings with Yuri Kobaladze, a senior member
of the KGB's London rezidentura working under diplomatic cover.
Clements and Gott had been ideologically inclined towards the Soviets,
and the latter’s true role had been revealed in an article in the Spectator,
based on Gordievsky’s information. However, in the case of Clements,

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MI5 must have known he was DAN, yet his name did not emerge until he
was challenged by The Sunday Times and admitted having been in touch
with the Soviets.

The way in which The Mitrokhin Archive came to be published is

quite extraordinary and the subsequent parliamentary inquiry offers a
unique opportunity to understand precisely what happened. It is also an
eloquent textbook account of how not to handle an important defector
and his information, and reveals some astonishing examples of perfidy
and ineptitude within the Security Service.

The first politician to be informed about the existence of a

potential defector codenamed GUNNER took place within a couple of
weeks of Mitrokhin’s initial approach in Riga, with the SIS Chief, Sir
Colin McColl, mentioning him to Douglas Hurd, the then Foreign
Secretary. As well as having spent fourteen years as a Foreign Office
diplomat himself, serving in Rome, New York and Peking, Hurd’s son
Tom was then also an SIS officer, so the Cabinet minister knew all about
that mysterious organisation referred to in Whitehall as ‘the friends’.
Indeed Hurd, who has written several spy novels, had also spent three
years as private secretary to Sir Harold Caccia, the FO’s Permanent
Under-Secretary, and a former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, right at the very heart of Whitehall's intelligence system.
Exactly what Hurd was told by McColl on that occasion is not recorded,
but a man of his experience would have instantly grasped the
implications, especially as Mitrokhin from the outset had made
publication of his book a condition of his cooperation. Even at that time,
with the Soviet Union in ruins and former intelligence personnel forming
orderly queues outside American embassies in an effort to flee the chaos

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and trade on their knowledge, Mitrokhin must have stood out as a
potential espionage coup.

Hurd was told formally about the existence of the source

codenamed GUNNER in August 1992, and two months later he gave his
permission to the plan to exfiltrate Mitrokhin and his family to England
in October, but the Prime Minister, John Major, was not informed about
any of these events until January 1993, three months after Mitrokhin’s
arrival, when he was briefed by McColl. None of this is unusual or
improper, as the Foreign Secretary is routinely informed about SIS's
work, and is required to personally approve individual operations where
there is some risk involved, especially is there is a danger of political
'blow-back'. Long gone are the days of the infamous 'robber barons' of
SIS who often mounted hazardous undertakings without any ministerial
sanction, and in April 1956 even consented to sent a diver on a seccret
mission under a Soviet warship, contrary to an express ban made by the
Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. The system of ministerial approvals
subsequently introduced after the fiasco in Portsmouth, which resulted in
the death of SIS's frogman, eliminated the 'plausible deniability' that had
been so attractive to politicians, but there had remained, until the passage
of the Intelligence Services Act in 1994, some protection in the well-
established principle that as Britain did not acknowledge the existence of
a peacetime intelligence agency, so ministers therefore were unable to
respond to Parliamentary Questions on the subject. Granting Mitrokhin
and his family British citizenship, and exfiltrating them 'black' from
Latvia, was relatively low risk, given the Baltic state's new independence,
but the entire undertaking nevertheless required Hurd's approval, and he
granted it.

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 My name first came to prominence the following month when the
Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, and the Intelligence Coordinator,
(Sir) Gerald Warner, were briefed by SIS, and by the Director-General of
the Security Service, Dame Stella Rimington, who discussed the British
names in what had by now become JESSANT’s material. For operational
reasons, SIS changed GUNNER’s codename once he had been resettled
in Britain. Additionally, Warner, a retired senior SIS officer, briefed the
Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Rodric Braithwaite.
Warner had joined SIS in 1954 and had served overseas in Europe and
the Far East until 1976 when he returned to headquarters and served,
until his retirement in 1990, as McColl’s deputy. As Intelligence
Coordinator, Warner’s function was to advise the Cabinet Secretary on
intelligence issues and oversee Britain’s intelligence-gathering
organisation. The fact that he was placed in control of the publication
project reflects the importance given to it in Whitehall’s secret corridors.
As for Sir Rodric, he was a former ambassador in Moscow and an
experienced diplomat, whose responsibilities as head of the JIC was to
run the country’s analytical capability and set the requirements for the
individual agencies. Usually a JIC Chairman would not be expected to be
indoctrinated into the detail of every SIS operation, so his inclusion
inside the Mitrokhin ring of secrecy is also significant as further evidence
of the importance attached to the project.

The issue that had arisen was, as Hurd's predecessor Malcolm

Rifkind had wisely anticipated, how the British names mentioned by
Mitrokhin should be handled in the book. The principal focus of MI5’s
attention in early 1992 was Michael John Smith, a former member of the
Communist Party who had been identified by another KGB defector,
Viktor Oshchenko, as a spy whom he had run when he had been a Line X

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(science and technology) specialist based in London under diplomatic
cover as a third secretary between 1972 and 1979. Oshchenko had
defected from Paris to SIS in July 1992, and had named Smith who was
then working for GEC-Marconi as a Quality Audit Manager at the Hirst
Research Centre in Wembley. From MI5’s standpoint, this unexpected
windfall proved extremely useful, because buried in Mitrokhin’s notes
was a comprehensive account of the work for the London rezidentura
conducted by the spy codenamed BORG. Thus, by coincidence, two
KGB defectors had independently fingered Smith, and also served to
confirm each other’s bona-fides.

Relying on Oshchenko’s tip, MI5 had entrapped the quality

assurance engineer by sending one of its officers, masquerading as a
Russian, to re-establish contact with BORG, and record him making
some damaging admissions. Smith was eventually prosecuted, although
he denied being reactivated as a spy by the KGB in 1990, and when he
was arrested at his home in Kingston-upon-Thames on 8th August 1992
his car was found to contain unclassified documents concerning the
Rapier anti-aircraft missile and an obsolete document claimed to have
been used on the ALARM missile. Professor Meirion Francis Lewis, a
witness at Smith’s trial, was the key expert who commented on the
ALARM evidence. MI5 had been embarrassed to discover that Smith’s
security clearance had been removed in 1978, when he had been spotted
as a former CPGB member, but by then he had sold his KGB contact
details of the WE-177 nuclear bomb fuze. Smith’s conviction had been
based, not on Mitrokhin’s material, but on Oshchenko’s tip, and John
Major had been briefed on the progress of the investigation by MI5's
Stella Rimington - twice, in June and October 1993.

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 In the government’s Cabinet reshuffle of July 1995 Malcolm
Rifkind replaced Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary and by the end of
the month he had read an account of the JESSANT case, but it was not
until March the following year that SIS sought his approval in principle
to the publication of the archive, and an inter-departmental working
group was created, representing MI5, SIS, the Home Office, the Foreign
Office and the Cabinet Office, chaired by John Alpass, Warner’s
replacement as Intelligence Coordinator. A former Deputy Director-
General of the Security Service until 1994, Alpass did not hold his
working party’s inaugural meeting until the end of June 1996, by which
time SIS had nominated Christopher Andrew as a suitable editor of
Mitrokhin’s archive.

The original incentive to publish had come from Mitrokhin, whose

life ambition had been to release his purloined material, while SIS was
preoccupied with exploiting the information from the papers that had by
now been shared with no less than twelve other countries. Some three
hundred names had been passed to the French security agency, the
Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), while MI5 was
concerned that the imminent prosecution of the former NSA spy Robert
Lipka in the United States might reveal Mitrokhin’s role to the media. If
Lipka went to trial, so the FBI advised MI5, the authorities might be
forced to reveal the source of the information that had prompted the
criminal investigation. Such a disclosure would have been unwelcome in
London where it was judged that there were still plenty more leads to be
pursued.

From an operational point of view, Mitrokhin’s insistence on

publishing his material must have been quite a nuisance to SIS, but it was

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the one condition he had imposed on defection, apart from the
resettlement of his family. Naturally SIS wanted to squeeze every
operational advantage from his archive before his defection became
public knowledge, with all the security problems such a disclosure would
imply. It is not uncommon to keep a defection secret, leaving his former
employers uncertain about his fate and maybe reluctant to suspend their
activities. Once the Russian SVR knew for certain that Mitrokhin had
defected to the British it would be likely to undertake a damage limitation
exercise and estimate what current operations he might have
compromised. Although SIS was confident that the Russians would have
no inkling of the size of the catastrophe Mitrokhin represented, as the
idea that any single person could accumulate as much material as the
archivist had seemed incredible, any public statement confirming his
presence in Britain would unquestionably complicate his personal
security. It would also allow the Russians to instigate counter-measures,
and at the very least send a warning to their assets across the globe,
perhaps eliminating the option of conducting the kind of sting
entrapments that thus far had netted Smith, Lipka and Trofimoff. In all
three cases the retired spies had been tricked into making highly
incriminating statements that had been recorded. All had been telephoned
at home by men masquerading as Russian intelligence officers anxious to
re-establish contact, and in every case the former spies had agreed to
meetings. Once these tactics had been publicised, no other retirees would
be likely to fall into the same trap, hence the need to keep the lid on what
had been happening.

When the new Labour government was elected in May 1997 the
incoming prime minister, Tony Blair, already knew about the JESSANT
project, as he had been briefed by Sir Robin Butler in January 1995. On

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that occasion the intended topic of conversation had been the imminent
publication of Oleg Gordievsky’s memoirs, Last Stop Execution, which
was to include references to various senior figures in the Labour Party.
Gordievsky’s intention, to expose the journalist and author Richard Gott,
had been leaked to the Spectator the previous month, but he had others in
his sights, among them Michael Foot, who had been cultivated by the
suave Mikhail P. Lyubimov, one of the KGB’s most cosmopolitan
officers who had arrived in London under third secretary cover in 1963.
According to Gordievsky, Foot was codenamed BOOT and had accepted
money from the KGB in the form of subscriptions to Tribune, but he also
had a list of other KGB targets, among them the trade union leaders
Richard Briginshaw, Ray Buckton, codenamed BARTOK, and Alan
Safer. Gordievsky’s book was intended to have an explosive impact, and
Bulter’s meeting with Blair had been planned to assure the Labour leader
that the defector’s allegations had been corroborated by another source,
namely Mitrokhin. As a ‘Line PR’ political specialist, and the KGB’s
rezident-designate in London until his recall in May 1985, Gordievsky
had gained an encyclopaedic knowledge of the rezidentura’s targets and,
more importantly, its list of ‘confidential contacts’. The unexploded
bomb, waiting to detonate, was the catalogue of left-wingers in the
Parliamentary Labour Party whom Gordievsky intended to denounce,
among them the three MPs Joan Lestor, Jo Richardson and Joan
Maynard. All, of course, were well-known for their pro-Soviet views, but
according to Gordievsky, the KGB prized them as ‘confidential contacts’.
It is likely that at his meeting with Blair the Cabinet Secretary might have
hinted, while revealing the existence of the new defector, that other
Labour Party names might emerge. Two did, but both Tom Driberg and
Raymond Fletcher were dead. A former YCL and CPGB member and
codenamed LEPAGE by the KGB, Driberg had been Chairman of the

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Labour Party and had died in August 1976, having been ennobled as
Lord Bradwell. He was the MP I had first encountered on the beat in
Covent Garden, and later had appeared in my dossier on corruption in
British public life. Fletcher, codenamed PETER when he was recruited in
1962, had been elected the MP for Ilkeston two years later, and had died
in 1991. He had spent twenty-one years in the Commons but had been
thought by MI5 to have been run as an influential source by the Czech
StB.

Tony Blair may not have realised the implications of what he had
been told by Butler in January 1995, when JESSANT’s book project had
not yet begun, but the new Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, was briefed
on 24 October 1997, five months after he had taken office, but there were
some serious omissions from the paper placed before him on that
occasion. For example, it did not mention the restrictions placed on the
project by his predecessor, Malcolm Rifkind, and insisted, quite
incorrectly, that ‘no British national will be named without Security
Service agreement’. In fact, of course, Rifkind’s ban had extended to all
names, British and foreign, and had specifically excluded MI5 from
making the decision about naming names. Thus, on the very first
occasion Cook was indoctrinated into the JESSANT secret, he was
materially misinformed about the terms under which the project had been
allowed to proceed in the first place. Not only had the main Rifkind rule
been dropped, but the paper had created an entirely new principle of MI5
giving its approval to particular identifications. Now out of office, and
indeed out of Parliament having lost his seat at the 1997 general election,
Rifkind was not consulted about this extraordinary development, and
under the Whitehall rules which prevent new administrations learning of

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the deliberations of its predecessors, Cook could only take the word of
his civil servants for what had happened previously.

It was at this stage that Cook ought to have intervened and talked
the whole issue through with his Cabinet colleague Jack Straw, who had
been trained as a lawyer before he had been elected to the Commons. If
Cook had not been able to see the legal pitfalls in allowing MI5 to decide
who should, or should not be named in The Mitrokhin Archive, Straw
probably would have spotted them, but in the event he was not consulted.
Cook’s only excuse would have been that he was at the time conducting
an affair with his secretary and was preoccupied with supervising what
he termed ‘an ethical foreign policy’.

Once Cook had given his approval to the departmental paper on

the Mitrokhin project, the Prime Minister’s consent was requested two
months later, but was not forthcoming until early in January 1998
because of concerns about a possible adverse reaction in Moscow. Tony
Blair and his foreign policy advisers evidently were worried about how
Mitrokhin’s revelations would be received by Vladimir Putin, himself a
former FCD officer, and doubtless the Kremlin could have been expected
to be irritated by the way Mitrokhin had been spirited out of Russia.
Despite these fears Dr Andrew had been pressing ahead with his drafts of
the book, even though he did not sign any formal contract with SIS until
the middle of February 1998, when MI5 complained about the way SIS
had been feeding material to the historian. In fact the absence of any
‘watertight legal contract’ with Dr Andrew had been discussed by the
working group as early as March 1997, but because he had already
undergone a positive vetting procedure while working with Gordievsky
on KGB: The Inside Story, and had signed the Official Secrets Act, SIS

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regarded his security clearance as sufficient guarantee of his co-operation
and compliance.

This sequence of events also reveals astonishing complacency,

inertia and ineptitude in Whitehall, for the Prime Minister did not give
his consent to the publication project until the New Year of 1998, by
which time it had well underway for more than eighteen months, with Dr
Andrew having commenced his work before the end of June 1996,
apparently on a voluntary basis, and certainly without any publishing
contract.

It was not until the middle of June 1998 that MI5 finally cleared
the British material for the JESSANT project and belatedly began to
realise the grave implications of the references in the text to HOLA, the
spy described in subsequent correspondence as ‘an 86 year-old woman
who spied for the KGB 40 years ago’. This, of course, was Melita
Norwood and the new Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, was told of
the situation, for the first time, on 10 December 1998, and informed that
John Alpass’s working party was scheduled to meet in the middle of
January 1999 to discuss progress. The Home Office minute addressed to
Straw, and his Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir David Omand, explained
that MI5 had decided not to approach Mrs Norwood directly because of
her age, and the lack of hard evidence against her. Neither the references
to her in the single VENONA text, nor in Mitrokhin’s notes, amounted to
evidence on which a successful prosecution could be mounted, or so
MI5’s legal adviser believed, and he had written to the Attorney-General,
John Morris, for confirmation of MI5’s decision to take no action against
her. Morris’s reaction to the request was to advise that any judge looking
at the matter in 1999 would rule the prosecution an abuse of process

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because MI5 had known of Mrs Norwood’s espionage since 1965, but
had done nothing. The last opportunity for the police to intervene, he
opined, had been six years earlier, in late 1992, when MI5 had learned of
the new evidence from Mitrokhin, but the intervening gap had made a
successful prosecution quite impossible because the European
Convention on Human rights required expeditious prosecutions. Clearly
implied in the advice from the law officers was the criticism that to
consider prosecution on the grounds that The Mitrokhin Archive would
publicly expose Mrs Norwood as a spy was a completely improper
motive. In layman’s terms, the lawyers were telling the molehunters that
a criminal prosecution was not an expedient to be deployed in an effort to
save a department’s embarrassment in the face of hostile comment from
the media and the public. Nevertheless, the draft pages of The Mitrokhin
Archive seen by the Alpass working party in January 1999 contained
references to Mrs Norwood, Michael Smith and myself, although only
Smith had been convicted of espionage. If the principles set out by
Malcolm Rifkind were to be adhered to, only Smith’s identity should
have been revealed, and it began to look as though MI5, headed since
April 1996 by Dr Stephen Lander, was more concerned about its
reluctance to have done anything about Mrs Norwood’s treachery, and its
failure to act on my offer of information, than any other consideration. As
the Security Service subsequently admitted, she had ‘slipped out of sight
between August 1993 and June 1998’, which meant not that she had gone
missing, but simply that MI5 had completely overlooked her case!

We can now see that the meeting held on 15 January 1999, to

which neither the Home Office nor the Foreign Office were invited to
send representatives, was a deliberate attempt to cover up MI5’s lapse.
The meeting had been convened specifically to discuss the situation

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regarding the British names, and by its conclusion had agreed that the
Home Secretary’s consent would be required for them to be identified in
the book. Almost unbelievably, this crucial decision was never conveyed
to Jack Straw. Even worse, it was this assurance, already given falsely to
Robin Cook, that had enabled him to endorse the project the previous
month. Thus the Foreign Secretary had been duped into giving his
approval to the publication on the basis of an entirely specious paper
which had made no mention of Malcolm Rifkind’s rules, and had
invented an entirely new criterion which may or may not have had MI5’s
approval. Since this identical document was approved by Tony Blair in
January 1988 one much presumes that it had been passed by MI5,
although that is by no means certain. If MI5 did play a part in drafting
that submission, then the Security Service was even more culpable for the
deception. In any event, the Alpass working group was now claiming that
the Home Secretary’s consent would be required for each British name
included in The Mitrokhnin Archive, although the Home Office remained
entirely ignorant of this, and had been excluded from the meeting where
this decision had been taken.

By the time MI5 had been prompted into action by the unwelcome
news that The Mitrokhin Archive would document HOLA’s espionage,
Dr Lander was scrambling around for cover to conceal his incompetence,
and that of his predecessor, Dame Stella. If he thought he would be able
to keep Mrs Norwood’s name out of the public arena he was mistaken,
because of a separate exercise undertaken simultaneously by SIS,
apparently on its own initiative.

A few months earlier, on some undefined date in December 1998,

a former Observer journalist, David Rose, had approached SIS for help in

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making a six-part television documentary series, The Spying Game, for
the BBC, planned to be broadcast in the autumn 1999 schedules. Usually
reticent to tangle with the media, SIS, under the leadership of McColl’s
successor David Spedding since September 1994, agreed to collaborate
with Rose, subject to ministerial approval. This development, in itself,
was a very surprising breakthrough for an organisation that has always
been shy of media attention, always defensive in the face of external
scrutiny, on the entirely reasonable grounds that ‘secret services should
be secret’. Now, perhaps sensing a public relations coup, to extract
maximum credit for its handling of one of the century’s most important
intelligence defectors, SIS was contemplating an unprecedented
collaboration. Hitherto SIS personnel had been banned from making
unauthorised public disclosures, writing their memoirs or otherwise
discussing the nature of their work, even in the most general terms. For
their part SIS had occasionally encouraged contacts with selected
journalists when they were thought to have useful information, or had
visited a particular part of the world, and of course had used journalism
as cover for officers on missions when it was convenient to do so, but
this had been a strictly one-way street. There had never been access to
SIS’s legendary archive, and the only authors to read SIS’s ‘CX” reports
were contracted academics writing official histories, not for publication
but for the Cabinet Office’s Historical Branch. Now Spedding was
sanctioning an arrangement that would include Sir Gerald Warner giving
a filmed interview in which he would discuss what Mitrokhin had
accomplished. Even when the veteran BBC reporter Tom Mangold
filmed Oleg Gordievsky he had not been granted access to any of the
defector’s SIS handlers, so Rose’s achievement represented quite a media
milestone in access to SIS.

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 The agreement between John Scarlett and Rose was ‘dependent on
ministerial clearance for publication’ in the words of The Mirtokhin
Inquiry Report, but was that sanction ever obtained by SIS and, if so,
who from? The appropriate minister, responsible for all SIS’s activities,
was Robin Cook, but according to the chronology of events assembled by
the Intelligence and Security Committee, the new Foreign Secretary had
only been informed of the JESSANT project on 24 October 1997, more
than six weeks before David Rose approached SIS for the first time, so he
could not have given his approval on that occasion. Cook’s private
secretary wrote to the Prime Minister’s private secretary ‘outlining the
Mitrokhin story and the publication project’ on 2 December, and this was
the catalyst for an exchange of correspondence which resulted in the
green light from Blair on 8 January 1988. But what precisely had he
given his approval to? The book project was one matter, but the
television collaboration was entirely different, and if that topic was not
part of Cook’s submission to 10 Downing Street, as seems likely, the
issue of publication was not raised with Cook again until the end of
March 1999. This lacuna was to be of critical importance when the
original plan, for the television programme to boost the book, was
reversed and, as we shall see, the BBC ended up dictating the content of
the book.

So in the meantime, had SIS obtained any ministerial approval for

the BBC’s involvement? The odds are against it because nobody else
knew of the plan until late in February 1999 when SIS disclosed the BBC
proposal to Alpass and to the Security Service, a revelation that
obviously served to exacerbate Lander’s dilemma, especially when the
following month the Attorney-General ruled out any prosecution of Mrs
Norwood. Almost simultaneously, Robin Cook was informed on 22

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March that the manuscript of the book had been completed by Dr
Andrew, and a redacted version of it was passed by SIS to David Rose.
While this was true, Cook was also told that the ‘Security Service are
clearing the detail contained in those chapters [referring to British cases]
with the Home Secretary (who was briefed on the project in 1998, and is
supportive) and the Attorney-General’. Every part of this assurance, of
course, was completely untrue. The sensitive chapters dealing with me
and HOLA were not being cleared by MI5 with Jack Straw, and the
Attorney-General, as we now know, had made his views on the matter
very plain, and did not intend to play any role in approving the
disclosures. In short, Cook was completely misled, for the second time.
Once again, he failed to realise he had been duped. In terms of the BBC,
it also looks as though the Foreign Secretary was presented with a fait
accompli on 22 March, and nothing like the request for ministerial
approval mentioned to the BBC in December. Reading between the lines
of the Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, which is far from explicit on this most
sensitive topic, it rather looks as though Cook had absolutely no idea, at
any time, that he was being misrepresented as having authorised the
entire collaboration with the BBC.

At a crucial meeting of the working group held on 7 June 1999

John Alpass explained that Cook had given his approval, Jack Straw ‘was
aware of the project’ and that because of the Attorney-General’s view
that a prosecution was impossible, HOLA’s true name would not appear
in the text. The ambiguity, in what exactly ‘the project’ encompassed, is
obvious. In addition, SIS announced that Rose intended to devote an
entire programme to Mitrokhin but ‘would not use material which was
not in the book’. Apparently satisfied by this state of affairs, although this
was a very precise description of what would eventually happen, Alpass

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then wrote a report to the Cabinet Secretary to update him on the latest
developments. It may well have been that, based on this reassurance, MI5
believed that it had been let off the hook, for Scarlett had given the group
his opinion that the BBC would not be able to use HOLA’s true name,
but the ticking time bomb detonated on 23 June when David Rose
revealed to SIS that he had been able to identify HOLA. How had he
accomplished this? SIS subsequently asserted that Rose had researched
clues ‘based on details in the book The Haunted Wood, combined with
his own efforts in Washington DC’ but this could not have been true. The
Haunted Wood was one of five books originally commissioned by Crown
Books in New York and negotiated with the KGB by the Cambridge
historian John Costello and his editor, James Wade. Each of the five titles
were to have been written jointly by a western historian and a selected
KGB officer, and Harvey Weinstein’s chosen partner in his project, on
Soviet espionage in the United States during the early Cold War, was
Alexander Vassiliev, who arranged supervised access to certain records
locked away in the KGB and Central Committee archives. The only
problem with Scarlett’s explanation of Rose’s discovery was that neither
Weinstein nor Vassiliev had even the slightest idea of Mrs Norwood’s
existence. They did know of the single VENONA message addressed to
London in September 1945 which had referred to TINA, but they had
absolutely no reason to connect her with Mrs Norwood and did not do so,
which explains why the text of The Haunted Wood contains no clue to it,
but does not thrown any light on Scarlett’s assertion. The explanation for
Scarlett’s ‘misdirection’ was either to conceal SIS’s own leak, or to cover
up an indiscretion on the part of the FBI, implying that Rose had
somehow extracted Mrs Norwood’s name in the United States from a
member of the FBI’s counter-intelligence staff which had been briefed on
the JESSANT material. However he had achieved his tip, but now armed

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with her true name, Rose had found her listed in the London telephone
directory, and on the electoral roll, and he obviously intended to confront
her. Clearly aghast at this unwelcome development, Alpass immediately
wrote to the Cabinet Secretary to inform him that the wheels had come
off the project. He confirmed that ‘the intention has been not to reveal
HOLA’s identity in the book’ but admitted that the BBC had ‘now
correctly identified her from other sources of information, and they may
be tempted to break the story before September’. The understatement is
not hard to discern, as it must have been a racing certainty that no self-
respecting journalist, and nobody with Rose’s credentials, would fail to
follow up such a crucial lead. Quite simply, he was on to a scoop and he
would be bound to exploit it.

In other words, now that the BBC had found out HOLA’s identity,
Alpass suspected the broadcaster was going to renege on its collaboration
agreement with SIS. But what were the terms of that arrangement, and
who were the parties to it? These were the inconvenient questions that
would go unanswered, and anyway unasked by the Intelligence and
Security Committee.

What is curious about this episode is that instead of pressing the

BBC to keep to its original agreement, as might have been expected, ‘the
working group was persuaded by the book’s publisher to include the
names of Mrs Norwood and Mr Symonds’, which is a breathtaking
admission, although the Intelligence and Security Committee failed to
establish whether this persuasion occurred on 24 June or 19 July. This is
important because if, as seems likely, John Alpass caved in at the June
meeting, absolutely no effort was made to hold the BBC to the terms
agreed with Christopher Andrew. It follows therefore that, however

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bizarrely, SIS had taken on the role at the meeting of representing the
interests of the publishers and the BBC, and neatly sandbagged Alpass
and his hapless MI5 colleagues. Having congratulated themselves on
obtaining what amounted to a veto for the Home Secretary to exercise on
their behalf, they had been completely outmanoeuvred and now faced the
prospect of publication of British names in a way that was entirely
contrary to the Rifkind rules.

Alpass correctly anticipated massive media and parliamentary

interest in Mitrokhin’s disclosures, and said Jack Straw would be briefed
on the latest developments, adding that he believed that it was not
necessary to involve the Prime Minister any further. Despite Alpass’s
plea, the Cabinet Secretary copied his memorandum to Tony Blair’s
private secretary but, amazingly, it was never read by the Prime Minister
himself. However, officials at the Home Office instantly grasped the
implications and decided to lay the blame where it was deserved, with
MI5. In MI5’s previous version of events, given to Straw on 22 April
1999, Lander had implied that Mrs Norwood had escaped prosecution
because it had been vetoed by the Attorney-General, whereas the truth
was that Morris had advised in March that MI5’s five years of inertia
between 1993 and 1998 had prejudiced any chance of a prosecution. Far
from having refused to allow Mrs Norwood to be prosecuted, Morris had
simply pointed out that such an attempt would be completely improper.
Thus finally, on 29 June 1999, Straw learned that MI5’s previous
memorandum, dated two months earlier on 22 April, had been thoroughly
misleading and nothing more than a thin attempt to conceal its
incompetence. Incredibly, MI5’s desperate solution was to attend a
further meeting of the working group, on 19 July (without representatives
of the Home Office or the Foreign Office present) and ask for Alpass to

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request ‘ministerial guidance’ on whether to interview Mrs Norwood
before the BBC got to her, bearing in mind its strong objection to doing
so. These bizarre events can only be interpreted as MI5, having decided
not to confront HOLA, wanted some cover for it omission. At best, this
would have amounted to an administrative fig-leaf, but it is indicative of
MI5’s mindset that it was even willing to contemplate adopting such a
strategy.

The degree of panic that set in over the next few days was
heightened by a circular from David Spedding celebrating the imminent
publication of The Mitrokhin Archive, apparently unaware of the hideous
problem that had arisen over HOLA. Spedding trumpeted that the project
had received the full support of allied and European intelligence agencies
and amounted to an impressive intelligence coup, but omitted any
mention of Mitrokhin’s British spies. Evidently dismayed by Spedding’s
insensitivity, MI5 wrote to him on 20 July explaining that the Home
Office had briefed Straw, but the decision whether to interview HOLA
‘was an operational matter and not an issue on which the Home Secretary
should become engaged’. Thus, within twenty-four hours, MI5 had
altered its position from seeking ‘ministerial guidance’ on whether to
approach Mrs Norwood, to exercising its constitutional independence and
right to take operational decisions without consulting the Home
Secretary. This reversal occurred when the Security Service
representative on the working group reported to Thames House, and
someone at a senior level, if not Lander himself, had telephoned the
Home Office to clarify MI5’s position. Once again, Whitehall was in
pandemonium.

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 Alpass’s worst fears were realised when David Rose, accompanied
by his producer Sarah Hann, visited Mrs Norwood at her semi-detached
home on Tuesday, 10 August, with a hidden camera and a wireless
microphone which transmitted their two-hour conversation over the
dining-room table to a van parked in the street where a Times journalist,
Andrew Peirce, eagerly recorded it. The necessity of obtaining an
accurate record of her unguarded admissions was paramount because of a
potential obstacle that had been pointed out by the lawyers who had read
the material that Dr Andrew’s publishers, Penguin Books, had submitted
to Brian MacArthur of The Times for the newspaper serialisation,
scheduled for mid-September. They had advised that unless Mrs
Norwood incriminated herself, the inclusion of her name would open the
publishers, authors and newspaper to the possibility of an expensive legal
action for defamation. The offending pages could not be published
without an admission or consent from the widow. Fortunately for all
three, Mrs Norwood had lost none of her political zealotry, had no
hesitation in acknowledging her role in espionage, and her remarks were
clearly audible on the video soundtrack. As far as The Times and the
BBC were concerned, they both had their story and there were no legal
grounds for concealing HOLA’s identity any further. Although
VENONA was not mentioned during the interview, Mrs Norwood
confirmed that her husband Hilary, a mathematics teacher who had died
in 1986, ‘did not agree with what I did’ but had also been a hardline
CPGB member.

This news was reported to SIS which relayed it to MI5, and

resulted in a formal note from Home Office officials to Jack Straw, on 31
August, which can only be seen as an effort to ensure MI5 got the blame
for what had happened. The BBC had beaten MI5 to Garden Avenue,

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Bexleyheath, and the Home Office complained that they had not been
invited to the crucial meeting held by Alpass on 19 July, and that the
record of the discussion ‘was much delayed in coming to us’. This was a
really feeble response, bearing all the hallmarks of a Whitehall wriggle to
escape the blame which was clearly visible on the horizon. Humiliated,
having failed to interview HOLA, MI5 had again written to the Attorney-
General to enquire if her recorded admissions to the BBC might have
altered the legal position. Now the Security Service was really grasping
at straws. As MI5 had doubtless anticipated, Morris just repeated his
previous view that it was simply too late for a prosecution, an
observation that cold have been made by a first-year law student.

At this point MI5 appeared to be resigned to the criticism that it

knew it would sustain over the inclusion of my name, and that of Mrs
Norwood, in The Mitrokhin Archive, but even at this late stage it
apparently only expected some ‘adverse publicity’ and not the full-scale
fiasco that followed. In one final, desperate attempt to divert attention
away from its failure to pursue HOLA, MI5 asked the Attorney-General
to give consideration to the idea of prosecuting me on the basis on
admissions I had made during an interview I had given to David Rose.
Incredibly, while accepting that these remarks did not amount to
admissible evidence, MI5 tried to list offences I might have committed
under the Official Secrets Act, and asked for permission to launch a
police investigation. The Attorney’s tart reply, within the week, was a
reminder that I had been granted an immunity from prosecution fifteen
years earlier, in 1984, and that the immunity remained valid.

My supposed ‘admissions’ were actually nothing more than

remarks I made in the television interview I had been persuaded by Sarah

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Hann to give David Rose, on her assurance that a senior Russian general
had defected in secret and had corroborated everything I had said
previously about my eight years with the KGB. I came to regret ever
having agreed to talk to Rose because by the time his film had been
edited I was made to look as though I had been trained as a ‘Romeo spy’
in Bulgaria, long before I ever reached Moscow. This, of course, was
absurd, but then Rose compounded the offence by selling what purported
to be a lengthy exclusive interview with me to a newspaper, when I had
quite clearly stipulated that I intended to retain my rights over the
original television interview, for which I had accepted a minimal fee on
the understanding that I would share in subsequent syndication sales. My
consent to the original interview had been on the basis that I was to be
vindicated, particularly in respect of the allegations I had made so many
years earlier in the Daily Express. In the event, I was completely
misrepresented, as were my experiences. Instead of being portrayed as
someone who had volunteered potentially valuable information to the
police and MI5, but had been rejected as a fantasist, I was presented by
the BBC as a master-spy who had been tracked down by The Spying
Game’s tenacious sleuths.

As it turned out, advance copies of The Mitrokhin Archive had

been distributed in the United States, in breach of the press embargo
imposed until the newspaper serialisation was intended to commence, on
16 September. As word leaked of the book’s contents to ABC TV in New
York, The Times was obliged to print its story a week early, on Saturday
11 September catching everyone, including Dr Andrew who was
attending a conference in Berlin without a cellphone, completely
unawares. Suddenly the plan to release The Mitrokhin Archive in a
carefully controlled and unsensational manner had completely fallen

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apart, and my name, and that of Mrs Norwood, were front page news. For
all of its ramifications, this publicity had at least one rewarding result,
reuniting me with Nellie.

In retrospect the entire publication project seems to have been

handled with the same lack of professionalism that marked the release of
Dame Stella’s own controversial memoirs, Open Secret, in September
2001. Embarrassingly naïve and gauche, her autobiography made not a
single mention of the entire Mitrokhin affair, and never explained why
MI5 had bungled so badly. As I am in a unique position to document the
organisation’s failures, it is worth listing them.

There can be no doubt that Mitrokhin’s unexpected appearance in

1992 represented an impressive, unprecedented windfall for MI5 and
SIS, amounting in total to 3,500 reports sent to the security authorities of
36 countries. Literally hundreds of Soviet agents world-wide were
identified in his typescripts and scruffy envelopes packed with notes, and
we know that MI5 amassed more than three hundred different leads to
pursue in this country alone. As for SIS, the Mitrokhin goldmine was a
further opportunity to build on its reputation which had been so enhanced
by the successful recruitment, handling, exfiltration and resettlement of
Oleg Gordievsky. The fact that the Danish security service had played an
essential role in his recruitment and management in Copenhagen had
been overlooked, and SIS had bathed in the welcome praise which had
come from all quarters, including from the prime minister who had been
so impressed when she had made a special tour of its training
establishment, Fort Monckton. Once the object of derision and suspicion,
following the very public penetrations accomplished by Kim Philby and
George Blake, SIS had worked hard to shake off its reputation as an

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untrustworthy sieve. If the receipt of defectors is a valid litmus test of an
intelligence agency’s operational integrity, Gordievsky and Mitrokhin
represented eloquent proof SIS’s new-found efficacy. The same,
however, could not be said of MI5.

In evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee Dame

Stella and Dr Lander claimed that their relatively tiny agency had been
overwhelmed by the quantity of Mitrokhin’s material and, at a time when
Irish terrorism was a priority, and the organisation was engaged on the
lengthy investigation of the sabotage of a PanAm jet over Locherbie in
December 1988, they had categorised the cases requiring investigation
into four groups so as to concentrate on the spies who continued to pose a
threat to classified information. However, on their own admission,
HOLA fell into the second highest priority, so why was she shelved for
nearly five years? Equally importantly, why did MI5 so chronically
mishandle the so-called British names? Incredibly, these were not
questions that Tom King’s committee ever posed.

MI5 was rightly criticised in the media for having allowed Mrs
Norwood to escape prosecution, but the real scandal was not so much its
inept handling of the case, allowing it to go dormant for five years, but
the cover-up it pursued thereafter to conceal the scale of the blunder,
even to the point of misrepresenting to the Home Secretary the legal
advice it had received from the Attorney-General. As for Mrs Norwood
herself, MI5 has consistently downplayed her significance, asserting that
‘her value as an atom spy to the scientists who constructed the Soviet
bomb must have been, at most, marginal’. Surprisingly, nobody appears
to have taken MI5 to task over this woefully inadequate assessment of
HOLA, nor even asked how such a review could have been compiled

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with any accuracy if they had never bothered to interview her. What is
known is that she had been active in 1938 and connected to the
Woolwich Arsenal spy-ring headed by Percy Glading. Then she was in a
position of access, compromising atomic secrets, according to the single
VENONA message concerning TINA dating back to September 1945.
We know too that MI5 closed their file on Mrs Norwood in 1966 because
the VENONA material was far from conclusive and anyway was not
admissible in a criminal prosecution, saying she no longer posed a threat
because her security clearance had been revoked in 1951. However,
Mitrokhin made some extremely important disclosures, not the least of
which was the revelation that HOLA had been handled by the KGB
illegal Konon Molody until his arrest in January 1961. Working under the
Canadian alias ‘Gordon Lonsdale’, Molody had been the KGB’s illegal
rezident in London who had supervised the Portland spy-ring, and had
been in contact with Morris and Lona Cohen, the American couple who
had handled much of his covert communications. Molody’s arrival in
London in March 1955 represented the first time that there had been a
Soviet illegal rezident in Britain since the departure of Arnold Deutsch in
October 1937, and was therefore an event of some considerable
significance. Of interest to MI5 was the fact that Molody had not been
introduced to Harry Houghton by his KGB handler, Vasili Dozhdalev,
until October 1959, so what had the illegal been up to in the meantime?
This interesting fact had been disclosed by Houghton who, after his
arrest, had cooperated with his interrogators in the vain hope of
minimising his sentence, or even turning Queen’s Evidence. One possible
explanation was that Molody had been running Mrs Norwood, or a spy-
ring associated with her. Molody’s own somewhat disingenuous
memoirs, Spy, ghosted by Kim Philby in Moscow in 1965, give no clue
to his activities during this period, apart from confirming what MI5

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already knew, that he had enrolled on a Mandarin course at London
University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He was also
somewhat vague about precisely when he took over Houghton, and who
had run him earlier, but the precise date had been extracted from the
former Royal Navy Master-at-Arms while under interrogation. What was
certain was that Molody had not been despatched to London for the sole
purpose of running Houghton, because he had been in contact with case
officers from the embassy rezidentura since his arrival from Warsaw in
October 1952. Thus the KGB had waited a further three years before
sending Molody to London, and then there had been a further hiatus of
four years until he had taken him in harness. The KGB do not invest in
illegal rezidents to have them remain idle, so what had Molody been
doing or, more to the point, whom had he been running? Molody and the
Cohens were extremely important, high-value assets and the KGB would
not have sent them to London unless there was a good reason for doing
so. Whereas Molody had adopted the authentic identity of a Canadian,
Gordon Lonsdale, and was quite secure in his cover (indeed, MI5 never
discovered his true name until after he had been released from prison) the
Cohens had a considerable past, and because Morris had served in the US
Army his fingerprints were on file with the FBI, who regarded him as a
fugitive, wanted for questioning in connection with his involvement in
the Rosenberg’s atomic spy-ring. As Dzerzhinsky Square must have
known, the freedom of the Cohens, masquerading as the New Zealanders
Peter and Helen Kroger in Ruislip, could be ended by a single telephone
call to the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. In short, the KGB had
taken a risk in sending the Cohens to London, and it rather looked as
though Mrs Norwood was part of the reason for that fateful gamble.

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 It is quite obvious to any intelligence professional that because
MI5 pulled Norwood’s security clearance in 1951, that had not ended her
usefulness as a spy, a fact supported by the knowledge that she was still
in touch with the KGB’s illegal rezident a decade later. On that basis
alone, MI5’s assumption of her having been of only marginal interest is
absurd. It also follows that if Molody was acting as her controller, there
must have been good operational reasons to him to have done so, but
when had he first made contact with her? Norwood must have been an
important and active spy in 1961, a proposition supported by Mitrokhin
who alleged that in 1965 she had begun to cultivate a junior civil servant
codenamed HUNT, whom she succeeded in recruiting in 1967, and
remained productive, supplying details of defences sales exports, for the
next fourteen years. Upon his retirement he was allegedly given £9,000
to help him develop his own business, presumably a method of keeping
him in harness with access to useful information in his retirement. Once
again, the contradiction in MI5’s evidence is stark. On the one hand there
is the inference that she must have been harmless after 1951, whereas it is
acknowledged that she had been an active recruiter more than sixteen
years later. It is noticeable, and quite an irony, that although HUNT, is
alleged to have died, MI5 kept to the Rifkind rules and protected his
identity!

If it was really true that MI5 had placed Mrs Norwood into its
second highest priority, it is bizarre that the case should have been
allowed to ‘slip from view’, but there may be another explanation for this
extraordinarily unprofessional behaviour. Naturally, as Mrs Norwood
was active and undetected for so many years, it is somewhat historical in
nature, but it goes to the heart of MI5’s apparent reluctance to collect
whatever information I had about KGB officers whom I had met in

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Moscow who had worked in London, and MI5’s anxiety not to question
HOLA. The story dated back to December 1961 when a KGB officer,
Anatoli Golitsyn, defected to the CIA in Helsinki and named two
members of the KGB rezidentura in London who were, between them,
running no less than four important spies, three of whom were supplying
information about the Royal Navy.

Bearing in mind that MI5 knew that Molody had handled HOLA in
1961, and that she had been active as a recruiter six years later, any mole
hunter would have wanted to know what she had been doing during the
intervening years, a period when the KGB rezidentura was known to
have been operating at peak capacity, and at a time when its principal
Line X illegal support officer, Vasili Dozhdalev, had been withdrawn
from his embassy post in London. Dozhdalev had arrived from Moscow
in 1959, following a brief posting in 1952, and he had been identified in
January 1961 as the KGB officer responsible for handling Harry
Houghton. After his conviction for selling secrets from the Admiralty
Underwater Weapons Research Establishment at Portland, Houghton had
identified two of his Soviet contacts in London as Nikolai Korovin,
whom MI5 suspected had been the rezident, and Dozhdalev, who was
later named by the SIS traitor George Blake as his handler too. The arrest
of Blake in April 1961, so soon after the Portland spy-ring had been
rolled up, must have been a considerable blow for the KGB, and in such
circumstances the Soviets usually advise their networks to go into
temporary hibernation, but on this occasion there is ample proof that
another member of the rezidentura, Nikolai Karpekov, remained active,
and was running another spy in the Admiralty, John Vassall. After his
arrest in September 1962, following a tip to the CIA from the SCD’s Yuri
Nosenko, Vassall had identified Korovin and then Karpekov as his

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controllers, and in 1965 a scientist strongly suspected of espionage, Dr
Alister Watson, picked out Korovin and Karpekov as his contacts, and
then identified Sergei Kondrashev, a KGB officer who, incidentally, had
also run George Blake in 1953. Shortly before Houghton had been
arrested in January 1961 Korovin had handed responsibility for handling
Vassall over to Karpekov, and he had instructed him to cease operating
until he was contacted again, which did not happen until he was
reactivated just after Christmas 1961.

The significance of all this activity within the legal rezidentura is

that after the hasty departure of Korovin and Dozhdalev, only Karpekov
is known to have been running a spy in London, and he was one of the
two KGB officers named by Golitsyn as supervising a total of four
agents. Houghton and Vassall subsequently confessed to their espionage
and identified their handlers, but who had been the third spy supplying
information about the Royal Navy? MI5 had hoped the remaining source
had been Dr Alister Watson, a Cambridge-educated scientist based at the
Admiralty Research Establishment at Teddington, and known to have
been a university contemporary and friend of Guy Burgess and Anthony
Blunt, but hidden deep in MI5’s files were details of another, earlier
suspect. Although when challenged by MI5 Watson acknowledged
having held clandestine meetings with both Kondrashev and Karpekov,
he had always denied having passed either of them classified information
and would only admit to having concealed his Communist Party
membership to obtain a security clearance. However, before MI5 had
confronted Watson there had been another suspect, a senior naval officer
who had been seen visiting Karpekov’s home in Holland Park.

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 The very existence of this suspect was a closely guarded secret,
even within the Security Service, because he represented even more
political embarrassment for MI5, which had already caught and
imprisoned three spies in the Admiralty, being Vassall, Houghton, and
the latter’s girlfriend, Ethel Gee. Quite apart from the fact that MI5 had
thought it likely that there was probably another Soviet source in
Portland, maybe run by Houghton, who was never charged because there
was insufficient evidence against him, MI5’s Director-General, Sir Roger
Hollis, had been reluctant to initiate yet another investigation into the
loss of even more naval secrets. The cause of Hollis’s unwillingness to
pursue the remaining naval suspect was the prevailing climate at the time,
which was particularly hostile to the Security Service. Two tribunals of
inquiry had been empanelled to look into the breaches of security already
known, and Hollis feared the consequences if another scandal emerged.
His reticence is understandable, considering that two journalists had been
imprisoned for refusing to reveal their sources over a newspaper article
that had linked the Portland spies to Vassall falsely. Although there never
had been any such connection, Brendan Mulholland and Reginald Foster,
and later the veteran Fleet Street crime correspondent Percy Hoskins, had
suggested in print there was much more to the story, hinting that
microfilms found by MI5 at the Krogers’ bungalow in Ruislip had
contained evidence implicating a further source beyond those known to
have been in the Portland spy-ring.

When asked by the Radcliffe Tribunal about this supposed link

between the two arrests, twenty months apart, Sir Roger Hollis had
chosen his words carefully and had denied any such evidence had been
found, but he was not questioned about whether MI5 was investigating a
further lead. In fact the leader of MI5’s investigation team, Ronald

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Symonds (a future Deputy Director-General of the Security Service, but
no relation to me) strongly believed in the existence of another network
based in London. His view was based on two compelling facts. Firstly,
Karpekov and Korovin had been together the night the news broke of the
arrests of Houghton, Gee, Lonsdale and the Krogers and yet, according to
MI5’s technical staff monitoring their dinner table conversation, neither
had made any comment, or made any move to rush back to the embassy.
They had been completely unconcerned, which was either a
manifestation of masterly self-control on the part of the rezident and his
deputy, or they were genuinely unconcerned, perhaps safe in the
knowledge that their other organisation had gone undetected. Secondly,
there was the wireless traffic from Moscow to Lonsdale and to the
Krogers, which had been intercepted by GCHQ’s technicians. According
to their recordings, the KGB had continued to transmit signals to
receivers in London after the arrests of January 1961, which again
implied the existence of another apparatus that had worked in parallel to,
but in isolation from, the Portland network. Whilst this may be of only
historical interest in the 21st Century, the ramifications are immense, for
all the evidence points to Mrs Norwood being at the heart of a further,
undiscovered spy-ring, just as Symonds had suspected. It may also be
only relevant today because the Security Service demonstrably has gone
to extraordinary lengths to avoid opening this particular Pandora’s Box.
My only hesitation in advancing such a conspiracy theory is that some
might find it hard to believe that someone such as Sir Stephen Lander,
who only joined MI5 in 1975, more than a decade after these events had
occurred, could have any interest in concealing the misdeeds of the long-
distant past. However, the fact remains that MI5’s behaviour in the
Norwood case is very strange, and requires more of an explanation than
the lame excuses offered to Tom King’s committee.

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 Among some MI5 retirees it is common knowledge that a senior
Royal Navy officer was considered a serious espionage suspect by MI5 at
the very time Sir Roger Hollis was denying any discovery made in the
Kroger household had led to the identification of John Vassall as a spy
the following year. The correct sequence of events was that MI5 had
been tipped off to Houghton’s espionage by the CIA which in 1960 had
received an anonymous letter from a Polish intelligence officer, Michal
Goleniewski, who was preparing the way for his own eventual defection
in December of that year. The clue to Vassall’s espionage had come from
an entirely different defector, Yuri Nosenko. Those two cases, however,
did not account for the four spies mentioned by the third defector,
Anatoli Golitsyn, so the search had continued until the officer, whose
career had been at sea throughout the war and afterwards until 1959 when
he had gone to work for the First Sea Lord, became the focus of a
molehunt conducted by Michael McCaul. Much to the dismay of those
directly involved, the investigation had been abandoned on instructions
from the Director-General who allegedly had insisted that Whitehall and
Westminster could not sustain a further spy scandal, and the continued
existence of the Security Service might even be at stake. When in 1964
McCaul expressed his disagreement, he was transferred to the United
States as MI5’s Security Liaison Officer attached to the British embassy
in Washington DC, a useful post for malcontents. It was while McCaul
was in America that new evidence materialised which served to
incriminate Mrs Norwood.

In 1965 the US National Security Agency cryptographers had

cracked the VENONA message about the atomic spy codenamed TINA,
having worked on it almost twenty years, and this was the clue that MI5

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had needed to identify TINA as Mrs Norwood, a dedicated CPGB and
CND member, local political activist and subscriber to the Morning Star,
whose file showed her to have associated with known spies, such as
Percy Glading, as long ago as 1938. The text, dated 16 September 1945,
from General Pavel Fitin, head of the NKVD’s foreign intelligence
directorate, had been addressed to his London rezident, Boris Krotov, and
had been the subject of continuous cryptographic attack. The final
version, translated into English, had been circulated to MI5 on 29
January 1965, which had prompted the new investigation that was to be
shelved by the end of the year. Exactly why MI5 abandoned this
extremely important mole hunt is unclear, but considering that we now
know HOLA was active during this period, the decision to abandon it
looks utterly negligent. One explanation may have been the wish within
the Security Service, then still under the leadership of Sir Roger Hollis, to
bury past, awkward cases that might reopen the sensitivities of the
debilitating mole hunts which had threatened to paralyze the organisation
in 1964.

The real, continuing embarrassment for the Security Service was

that Mrs Norwood had been granted a security clearance in 1945 which
had not been revoked until 1951, despite her connection with a notorious
prewar espionage case, and her unconcealed, active CPGB membership.
On this basis Mrs Norwood had enjoyed access to classified atomic
information for at least four years, until the company for which she
worked had completed its only classified contract. That, of course, is not
to say, or even to imply, as MI5 attempted to do in its written evidence to
the Intelligence and Security Committee in 2000, that Mrs Norwood had
not engaged in any useful espionage during that period. The real
implication was that MI5 had been negligent in not checking on Melita

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Sirnis in 1938, and had blundered in granting her a clearance in 1945.
According to Mitrokhin’s notes, she had been recruited originally in 1937
by Andrew Rothstein, one of the CPGB’s founders and a well-known
Soviet agent, and had been handled by a GRU agent codenamed FIR
until 1944 when she had been handed over to Nikolai Ostrovsky, and
then had been run successively by two Trade Delegation officials, Galina
Trusevich and Yevgenni Oleynik, but had been put into cold storage in
April 1950 following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in January.

Dr Andrew speculates that FIR may have been the legendary GRU
agent Ursula Kuczynski, alias Ruth Werner and codenamed SONYA,
who moved to Britain from Geneva in 1943, and in November 1947 had
been interviewed at her home in Oxfordshire by MI5 after she had been
named by a defector, Allan Foote, as a Soviet spy. Shrewdly SONYA
had denied ever having engaged in espionage in Britain, and at that time
MI5 had not realised that Fuchs had been a spy, and that Kuczynski had
acted as his GRU controller, but two years later she had fled to East
Germany as soon as she had heard that Fuchs had been arrested. This
entire episode, of course, had also been an embarrassment for MI5
because it was only long after Fuchs had been imprisoned that it was
realised that it had allowed Ursula Kuczynski to slip through its fingers
two years earlier in 1947. Although powerless to arrest the young mother,
MI5 had accepted her denials, and had pursued her no further. In the light
of Fuchs's treachery, the lost opportunity had looked rather worse than
merely that.

Just on the basis of her relationship with SONYA, Mrs Norwood

would have been a fascinating subject to interrogate, but there would
have been numerous other issues to have raised with her. One curiosity is

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the fact that the Sirnis home in Lawn Road, Hampstead before the war
was next-door to the flat rented by Otto Deutsch, the legendary Soviet
illegal who had recruited Kim Philby in 1934. Surely this was no
coincidence, but what was her explanation for this? Czech by origin, but
travelling on an authentic Austrian passport, Deutsch had been the
NKVD’s illegal rezident in London, while ostensibly working at London
University researching psychology, assisted by his wife, Josefine who
had qualified as a wireless operator, and their child. In October 1937
Deutsch’s three-year alien’s permit had expired, and after what had
actually been a routine visit from the police, he had left the country
hurriedly, later to perish when a ship he was on was sunk in the Atlantic
in November 1942. Many of Deutsch’s secrets, as one of the celebrated
‘great illegals’ died with him, but maybe Melita Norwood could have
supplied some of the pieces of the jigsaw that was the career of the
magnetic personality responsible for having recruited Philby, Anthony
Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross. How could
MI5 have passed up such an opportunity?

After the conviction of Fuchs, contact with the spy codenamed

HOLA was resumed by the London rezidentura in 1952, and at some
point between 1945 and 1952 her codename had been changed. The
Soviets routinely had changed the codenames of their agents periodically
as a security precaution, and when they learned, probably from Kim
Philby and another source in America, that their cipher systems had been
compromised, and the British and American codebreakers were working
on the cryptographic project later codenamed VENONA, all the current
operational codenames were changed again, transforming TINA into
HOLA. Mrs Norwood, who would have been unaware of these counter-
measures, and probably completely ignorant of her own operational

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codename, was considered so valuable that in 1958 she had been awarded
the coveted Order of the Red Banner, the KGB’s highest award.
Mitrokhin also recorded her KGB contacts as Yevgenni Belov, Galina’s
husband Georgi Leonidovich, Gennadi Myakinkov, Lev Sherstnev and,
of course, the illegal rezident, Konon Molody, codenamed BEN. Such
continuing attention shows that HOLA was probably the KGB’s longest-
running agent in Britain, and the fact that from 23 December 1958, when
they first met, she was run (at considerable risk) by the illegal rezident in
Britain reflects her unique status.

MI5’s blatant bid to sideline HOLA’s significance as ‘marginal’ is

contemptible, especially in view of the decoration she received, which
only previously had been awarded to a spy the calibre of John Cairncross,
following his decisive contribution to the Soviet victory at the Battle of
Kursk. On the eve of the greatest tank battle in history Cairncross had
supplied the original Enigma intercepts from Bletchley Park that had
allowed the Red Army to locate the enemy’s airfields and launch a
decisive pre-emptive raid on the Luftwaffe, eliminating its ground-attack
aircraft from the theatre. Kursk had proved a turning-point in the war,
and Cairncross’s medal had been in recognition of his achievement.
According to Mitrokhin, what Mrs Norwood had achieved had been on a
par with Cairncross, no minor accomplishment.

For MI5 to have dropped TINA in 1965 is certainly odd, but may
be understandable in terms of the need then perceived to keep VENONA
source a secret. To have shelved her file again, when exposed as HOLA
in 1992, is quite incomprehensible. Admittedly she was by then quite
elderly, but the country and creed to which she had given her first loyalty
by then had ceased to exist, and it would not have taken much research to

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establish that she remained mentally and physically agile, and certainly
had much to offer in historical terms, if necessarily not much of actual
current operational value. When challenged on this point MI5 claimed
lamely that public interest issues had been taken into account, when such
matters are entirely beyond their purview.

The other area where MI5 is culpable is in the behaviour of Dame

Stella, the Director-General who succeeded Sir Patrick Walker in
February 1992. There had been three hundred Mitrokhin leads for MI5 to
pursue in Britain, yet she had fumbled the two most important ones, and
the scale of her misjudgments deserve close scrutiny. The most obvious,
of course, is her failure to tell successive Home Secretaries of the
JESSANT project, and it is clear that she neglected to properly brief
either Kenneth Clarke, or his successor in 1993, Michael Howard.
However, according to her own astonishing testimony before the
Intelligence and Security Committee, she ‘cannot remember ever being
briefed about Mrs Norwood’. The constitutional issue raised here is hard
to exaggerate, because if Michael Howard is to be believed, and he says
he was never briefed, then Jack Straw was the first Home Secretary to be
told about JESSANT, and he was not informed until 10 December 1988.
If, on the other hand, Howard is wrong, and in fact he was ‘made aware
of the project’ sometime in March 1996, as is claimed by his Permanent
Under-Secretary (PUS), Richard Wilson, who has averred that the
publication was mentioned in passing during a meeting with Rimington
and Lander, then the situation is little altered because ‘the Director-
General of the Security Service did not know about Mrs Norwood and
Mr Symonds and she was therefore unable to brief the PUS at the Home
Office’. The implication of this was, of course, that ‘when Michael
Howard was made aware of the publication project, both he and Richard

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Wilson were unsighted on Mrs Norwood and any potential controversy
within the UK material’. This verdict, contained in the Intelligence and
Security Committee’s report, underlines the degree of Dame Stella’s
appalling negligence in respect of Mrs Norwood, but Jack Straw revealed
in a statement to the House of Commons on 13 September 1999, that as
far as I was concerned, he had never heard of me until the previous
weekend, when The Times published its scoop!

We do know that a decision not to interview Mrs Norwood was

taken at relatively low level in 1992 for fear of compromising
Mitrokhin’s security or ‘the international handling of leads to still active
spies’ which, in plain language, amounts to an admission that MI5 did
not have the skill or the imagination to visit her without inadvertently
tipping her off to the fact that she had been compromised by Mitrokhin.
This explanation is obviously flawed, not least because of the widespread
publicity given in September 1992 to the defection of Viktor Oshchenko.
What better excuse, if one really had to be given, than to exploit the
happy coincidence of both defections and give Oshchenko the credit for
fingering HOLA? Such tactics are commonplace in the intelligence
community, and in the example of Robert Lipka the FBI had publicly
thanked Oleg Kalugin for leading them to him, when he had done no
such thing, although his denials had been disbelieved. Indeed, the
exercise had worked so well that the FBI had even subpoenaed Kalugin
to give evidence for the prosecution against George Trofimoff, another of
Mitrokhin’s victims. Spies always dread the knock on the door
immediately after a defection has occurred, and it would have been
unusual if Mrs Norwood had not been mildly apprehensive following the
media coverage given to the defections of Oleg Lyalin in 1971, Oleg
Gordievsky in 1985 and Viktor Oschchenko in 1992. All were members

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of the so-called ‘London Club’ of KGB officers who had served in
Britain, and might have been in a position to compromise HOLA. In fact,
as we know, none of the three were, but Mrs Norwood could not have
been entirely confident on that score, although she must have developed
nerves of steel since the arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of Konon
Molody who probably could have traded his freedom for her arrest at any
time during the three years he was incarcerated in Britain.

Clearly the mistaken decision to delay confronting Mrs Norwood

was taken at a relatively junior level within the Security Service, and the
error was to be compounded the following year when the entire file was
shelved, apparently without the knowledge of the Director-General, or so
she says. Even the reasons behind this blunder were improper, for such
matters are the province of the law officers, not mole hunters. If, as MI5
claimed, they had dropped the case on public interest grounds, they were
not entitled to do so. When challenged on this point, MI5 later resorted to
a blatant lie, claiming that Mrs Norwood’s ‘offences were committed 50
years ago’ when the correct figure was more like thirty.

The role of the counter-intelligence officer is to advise on

operational issues, and emphatically not to take other issues into account,
especially on such a crucial matter. In my case, it is equally incredible
that MI5 waited more than seven years, until 9 September 1999, to
enquire if I could be prosecuted, when of course it had always known of
the terms of my immunity, granted by the DPP, Sir Tony Hetherington,
fifteen years earlier in 1984.

The purpose of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security

Committee is to provide democratic supervision of MI5, SIS and GCHQ,

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but with a staff of just a clerk and a single researcher it is heavily
dependent on what it is told, and in terms of public confidence, it reports
not to Parliament, but to the prime minister, who personally appoints all
nine members and decides what should be included in its reports. As an
effort to instil confidence, the Mitrokhin Inquiry Report, published in
June 2000 was, quite simply, a travesty. Of the two Cabinet Intelligence
Co-ordinators who were directly involved in running the JESSANT
publication project, only John Alpass gave evidence to the committee,
but only in writing and not in person, and Sir Gerald Warner, who held
the post between 1991 and 1996, was entirely absent from the
proceedings, and not even mentioned by name. A career SIS officer who
had retired as McColl’s Deputy Chief in 1990, Warner would have been
a key witness, yet he was made available for an interview with the BBC
programme The Spying Game, but failed to appear before the
parliamentary committee. His successor as Co-ordinator, John Alpass,
did offer written evidence to the committee, but declined to appear in
person and the Committee never recorded that he had been one of Dame
Stella’s two Deputy Directors-General until he switched to the Cabinet
Office in 1994. Of the three SIS Chiefs who supervised the Mitrokhin
project, only Richard Dearlove, who took over SIS in August 1999, just a
fortnight before the book was to be published, gave evidence to the
Committee. Admittedly Dearlove had been SIS’s Director of Operations
since 1994, and Assistant Chief since 1998, had an intimate knowledge
of the JESSANT case, almost from the outset, but he was the only SIS
officer to appear. Spedding, who died in June 2001, was succumbing to
cancer when the Committee was conducting its inquiry, but McColl was
in perfect health and never appeared. Among the other distinguished no-
shows was the former Cabinet Secretary, now Lord Butler, and the
former Chairman of the JIC, Sir Rodric Braithwaite.

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 As for the senior civil servants, none seem to have been
disadvantaged by the Committee’s typically measured criticism of the
way they so comprehensively misled their ministers. The PUS at the
Home Office, Sir Richard Wilson, subsequently became Butler’s
successor as Cabinet Secretary; Wilson’s successor at the Home Office,
Sir David Omand, was appointed Director of GCHQ and later served as
the Cabinet’s Intelligence Co-ordinator; Dame Stella retired to a
directorship of Marks & Spencer, and Sir Stephen Lander retired to head
the Law Society’s discredited complaints committee. In short, it was
more a performance of musical chairs that anyone being penalised or
disadvantaged for gross dereliction of duty. So where did this leave the
Intelligence and Security Committee? Its Chairman, Tom King MP,
received a peerage when he retired from the Commons at the 2001
General Election, and the Committee headed by his replacement, Ann
Taylor MP, contained not a single member with any personal experience
of intelligence. The first Tom King knew of Mitrokhin’s existence was
on the evening of 11 August 1999 when he met Dearlove informally,
upon his appointment as Chief, just two weeks before publication of The
Mitrokhin Archive. The Committee’s clerk received a single copy of the
uncorrected proofs of the book from Dearlove on 3 September 1999, four
months after the BBC had been sent a synopsis, and days after American
television channels had acquired bound copies of the finished book.

In retrospect, nobody emerges from the Mitrokhin affair with much

credit. The BBC and The Times competed against each other to see who
could renege on their agreements first; MI5 tried every slippery trick to
conceal Dame Stella’s stunning incompetence; Alpass tried to protect his
former MI5 colleagues and then caved in to pressure brought by SIS on

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behalf of the BBC; senior civil servants conspired to keep their ministers
in the dark and played Robin Cook off against Jack Straw. Michael
Howard complained he had never been told of the project, while Straw
insisted he ought to have been informed much earlier; Rimington and
Lander retired with the grateful thanks of the nation, Warner received a
knighthood, while King and Butler joined their Lordships’ House. All of
this would be funny if it was not so tragic, and as I read and reread the
The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report I was struck by one of the key items
contained in the Intelligence and Security Committee’s central
questionnaire, which was never answered, It was to be found in point
three out of a total of five principal issues to be addressed: ‘Why was
Symonds not taken seriously when he offered his services in 1984/5?’
Obviously the Committee was not completely serious when it posed this
question, because it never asked me.

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