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It is like layers of an onion, and the more you peel them away, the more you feel like crying. There are two laws running this country: one for the security services and one for the rest of us. James Miller, ex-MI5 agent
For years I wondered what the last day would be like. In January 1976 after two decades in the top echelons of the British Security Service, MI5, it was time to rejoin the real world. Peter Wright, Spycatcher preface
I went into the old building. Here, in the teak-inlaid corridors and corniced offices, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt were hunted down. And here too we had fought MI5’s most secret war over suspicions of an uncovered mole at the heart of the Service. Our suspect was the former Director-General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, but we have never been able to prove it. Hollis’s friends had bitterly resented the accusation and for ten long years both sides had feuded like medieval theologians, driven by instinct, passion and prejudice. ibid.
Brundrett crisply described the problem. It had become virtually impossible to run agents successfully behind the Iron Curtain, and there was a serious lack of intelligence about the intentions of the Soviet Union and her allies. Ethical and scientific initiatives were needed to fill the gap. ibid. p6
Years later, when I began to search out for MI5 the well-born Englishman who had become addicted to Communism in the 1930s, this period of my life came to fascinate me. They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism. I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet it was they who turned to espionage. I became the hunter, and they the hunted. ibid. p13
Liddell was a towering figure in the story of MI5. He joined in 1927, from the Special Branch, where he almost singlehandedly ran a Soviet counterespionage program. He controlled MI5 counterespionage throughout the war with determination and elan, and was the outstanding candidate for the Director-General’s chair in 1946. But Attlee appointed a policeman, Sir Percy Sillitoe, instead. ibid. p33
The indecision over office space was indicative of the lack of clear thinking in Whitehall about the relative roles of MI5 and MI6 ... MI5 in the 1950s seemed to be covered with a thick film of dust dating from the wartime years ... Life was a mixture of the quaint and the archaic. ibid. p36
I took to Philby immediately. He had charm and style ... He had just been appointed MI6 Head of Station in Washington ... Two years later Burgess and Maclean defected ... Philby was considered the prime suspect for the Third Man. ibid. pp42-43
The Communist Party of Great Britain ... secret membership files were stored in the flat of a wealthy Party member in Mayfair ... The burglary was carefully arranged for a time when the occupants were away for a weekend in the Lake District ... Party Piece gave MI5 total access to the Party organization. ibid. pp54-55
MI6 in the mid-1950s never settled for a disaster if calamity could be found instead. ibid. p71
The decision to appoint Dick White as Chief of MI6 was, I believe, one of the most important mistakes made in postwar British Intelligence history. ibid. p75
The principle problem in postwar British Intelligence was the lack of clear thinking about the relative role of the various Intelligence Services. ibid. p75
Hollis took over at a time of unprecedented collapse in relations between the various British Intelligence Services. ibid. p78
The implications of this new discovery, code-named RAFTER, were enormous. Not only could we prove beyond any doubt that the Russians were listening to our Watcher frequencies; we could also use the same technique to check the frequencies being listened to on any receiver we could detect inside the Embassy. ibid. p93
Relations between British and American Intelligence in the late 1950s were at their lowest postwar ebb ... Behind all the difficulties lay the simmering distrust created by the defections of Burgess and Maclean, and the public clearance of Kim Philby. ibid. p98
ROC was one of the most important committees in postwar British Intelligence. For ten years, until the new generation of computers came in at the end of the 1960s, ROC was crucial to much of the success of GCHQ’s cryptanalytical effort. But of even greater importance was the way it began to break down barriers which had previously separated MI5, MI6, and GCHQ at working level. As in the war, British Intelligence once again began to function as a coordinated unit, and as a result was much more successful. ibid. p114
The truth was that the Russians used double-agent cases to play with MI5, identify our case officers, disperse our effort, and decoy us from their real operations. The standard of MI5 tradecraft was appalling. ibid. p120
The extent of the recruitment of ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’ became apparent with the convictions of Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs for nuclear espionage in the late 1940s ... The defections of Burgess and Maclean traumatized MI5. Philby and Blunt also fell under suspicion, but faced with their adamant denials the cases ran quickly into sand. ibid. p121
The records of all ten were investigated, and all were exonerated, including one George Blake, a rising young MI6 officer who had played a key role in the Berlin Tunnel ... ibid. p129
The message warned MI5 that Sniper had informed the CIA that he intended defecting to the United States ... Houghton, Lonsdale and presumably also the Krogers would all be blown by the defection ... Arranging the arrests was a prodigious feat of logistics ... The Krogers were soon identified by the Americans as Morris and Lona Cohen, wanted by the FBI in connection with the Rosenberg nuclear espionage case. ibid. p135-p39
As for the source, it could only be one of a dozen people at the top of MI5. ibid. p143
Throughout the 1950s American and British services pursued the Cold War with clarity of purpose and single-minded dedication. It was not a subtle war, and there were precious few complications. But in the early 1960s a rash of defectors began to arrive in the West from the heart of the Russian intelligence machine, each carrying tales of the penetration of Western security. ibid. p163
Vassall swiftly confessed to having been homosexually compromised in Moscow in 1955, and was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. ibid. p167
Many people in the secret world aged the night they heard Philby had confessed ... Philby’s defection had a traumatic effect on morale inside the senior echelons of MI5. Until then, theories about the penetration of MI5 had been nursed secretly; afterward they became openly expressed fears. It seemed so obvious that Philby, like Maclean before him in 1951, had been tipped off by someone else, a fifth man, still inside. And of course, the possibility of a fifth man chimed completely with Golitsin’s evidence about a Ring of Five. ibid. p174
Most damaging of all, the Russians had a chain of agents inside the American atomic weapons development program, and another with access to almost every document of importance which passed between British and US governments in 1945, including private telegrams sent by Churchill and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. ibid. p182
On the face of it, the coincidental Modin [Philby’s controller] journeys, the fact that Philby seemed to be expecting Elliott, and his artful confession all pointed in one direction: the Russians still had access to a source inside British Intelligence who was monitoring the progress of the Philby case. Only a handful of officers had such access, chief among them being Hollis and Mitchell. ibid. p195
Occasionally, during the searches of Mitchell’s office, Hollis talked about his early years. He told me about his travels in China during the 1930s, where he worked for British American Tobacco ... The roots of his dislike of the Americans lay prewar. ibid. p199
Penkovsky was, at the time, the jewel in MI6’s crown. He was a senior GRU officer who spied in place for MI6 and the CIA during 1961 and 1962, providing massive quantities of intelligence about Soviet military capabilities and intentions ... But in late 1962, Penkovsky and a British businessman, Greville Wynne, who was his cutout to MI6, were both arrested by the KGB, and put on trial. Wynne was given a long prison term (although he was eventually exchanged for Gordon Lonsdale and the Krogers) and Penkovsky, apparently, was shot. ibid. p204
As I read the files, a number of reasons made me believe that Penkovsky had to be the deception operation of which Golitsin had learned in 1959 ... MI6 needed a success, and they needed to believe in a success. In Petrovsky they got it. ibid. p207
Blunt swiftly named as fellow spies Leo Long, a former officer in British Military Intelligence, and John Cairncross, who had served the Treasury in 1940. ibid. pp218-219
Long was in the Apostles Society at Cambridge, a self-regarding elite club of intellectuals, many of whom were left-wing and homosexual. ibid. p221