Eventually I reached the tiny office and picked up the telephone. It was Victor.
"Do you know what the buggers have done now?" he roared. "What are you talking about, Victor?"
"They've switched horses. They want to appoint some chap called Graham Harrison. Does the name mean anything to you?"
"They will never accept him," I yelled back. "The man was a friend of Burgess and Maclean."
I suddenly remembered where I was. But I had no need to worry. The auctioneer's clerk continued to work on his figures, oblivious to my conversation. I told Victor I would call on him as soon as I got back to London.
Francis Graham Harrison was also a deputy secretary at the Home Office. Although there was no suggestion that he was a spy, he was a close friend of Guy Burgess, and had moved in the Oxford set which included Jennifer Hart and Arthur Wynn. To appoint a man with those connections would have been, to borrow F.J.'s phrase, grotesque, and I told Victor that the Service would never wear it.
Early the following week Victor rang again.
"An announcement will be made tomorrow," he said. "I think you will be pleased..."
"How did you swing it?"
"I took Dick by the ear and took him in to see Ted. We both told him there would be a mutiny unless he appointed Hanley. He soon got the point!"
The next day F.J. summoned in a couple of the senior officers to tell us that Hanley had finally been appointed.
"It's been a difficult campaign," he told me gravely, "but I have finally won through."
"I am very pleased to hear that, sir," I replied with a straight face.
Shortly before F.J. retired he and I had a short meeting to discuss the looming situation in Northern Ireland. It was clearly going to be the major problem facing his successor. He feared that it would threaten all that he had done since 1965 to build up MI5's counterespionage capability. He had lobbied the Treasury to provide more resources, but they had refused. They wanted F.J. to shift resources away from counterespionage and into counterterrorism. As far as they were concerned, the expulsion of the 105 diplomats had eradicated the KGB threat for a generation. But F.J. believed that complacency was precisely the way to fritter away the advantage he had achieved.
F.J. looked tired, as if he longed to put the burdens aside. He was a man of few words but I could tell he wanted to talk. He was glad to be going, he said. The pleasure of the work had all but disappeared. He was worried, too, about money. Although he cultivated the air of a gentleman, he was not a wealthy man. He had an attractive house in Hampstead, but he had a young daughter still to educate, and he talked bitterly of having to sell himself in the marketplace as a security consultant, when he should be retiring to his beloved bird-watching. (In fact, he became a consultant to Imperial Chemical Industries [ICI].
)
"Well, how do you think I've done?" he asked me as he cleaned his pipe, sucking and scraping at it almost nervously.
"What, you want to know, honestly?" I asked. He nodded.
"You got on top of the Russian problem, but I don't think you ever made contact with the ordinary officer."
He looked surprisingly wounded. "You should have told me," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't feel it was my place."
I always liked F.J., and I think most of the senior officers did too. He was never a wag, but he saw the absurdity of life and his profession. I will always treasure traveling to Australia with him for the first CAZAB conference in 1967. As we approached the passport barrier a party of ASIO officials was waiting to meet us on the other side. F.J. handed in his passport.
"What's this?" drawled the passport officer, pointing to the entry in F.J.'s passport under "Occupation."
F.J. had entered "Gentleman."
"That is my occupation," uttered F.J. in his most patrician manner, "I have no other. I am a gentleman. Don't you have them here?"
The Australian drew himself up to his full height, but luckily I had managed to attract the attention of the ASIO party, who hurriedly explained the situation and whisked us both through to the other side.
F.J. beamed for the rest of the day, as if he had won a great team match single-handed.
F.J. ran the office as a democracy of the elect. If you were a trusted senior officer, his door was always open, his manner always familiar. But he remained a remote figure to the younger generation of officers, and he was consequently blind to many of the resentments which were building up below.
Few in Whitehall mourned his passing. At the height of the row over his succession, he offered to stay on another year to give Hanley extra time to play himself in as deputy. But the Home Office would have none of it. He told the truth and politicians and civil servants hated him for it. He also kept the secrets, and that made him an object of fear and suspicion.
Within a year Dick White had also left, and British Intelligence had lost its two most important executives. Their contribution is hard to overvalue. They were a perfect match. Dick was the subtle interpreter of intelligence, smoothing feelings in Whitehall and Downing Street; F.J. was the tough man, sounding warnings and bringing bad news.
I broke with them on only one issue in twenty years - high-level penetration. I think history will judge that they were never prepared to force the issue through. Consequently they allowed decisions to go unmade and the issue to fester so that it caused more damage than it ever need have done. But in other ways their contribution was massive. They became a link between the Old and the New World, and together they made British Intelligence respected throughout the world.
- 23 -
Hanley seemed ill at ease when he first moved into the Director-General's office. He knew he was a controversial appointment, and this made him move with a greater degree of caution than ought otherwise to have been the case. He wanted to please and reassure his political and Whitehall masters, and he made compromises a more secure man might not have.
Hanley was a bright man, intellectually superior to F.J. But he lacked F.J.'s strength of character. I didn't have faith in him, as I had in F.J., and my separation from the office began once F.J. left. The Service began to change, and those last four years were an extended farewell.
At first the changes were slight - silly things, like the fact that Hanley, unlike F.J., never offered lifts in his chauffeured car. But then they were more pronounced. We moved offices from Leconfield House, first to Marlborough Street and then to the drab premises on Gower Street. I suggested to Hanley that we go for a greenfield site, perhaps in Cheltenham, but he was insistent that we had to stay in London. He began to promote his own men. They were young and keen, but they were civil servants: men of safety rather than men of arms. I began to realize that a generation was passing. For all our differences, those of us involved in the great mole hunts, on whichever side, were fast disappearing. The age of heroes was being replaced by the age of mediocrity.
Hanley summoned me in soon after taking over to talk about my position.
"I have faith in you, Peter, and as long as I am in this job, there will be work for you here," he told me, referring to the rising resentment which had plagued my last year in D3.
He told me he thought I should leave my job as K Branch consultant, and come and work for him personally.
"I want you as my personal consultant on counterespionage," he told me. "You'll have an office next to mine, and you'll see every paper as before. But I want you to look at some fresh problems for me. I don't want you wrapped up in the current K Branch cases - I want you to be looking ahead."
We drew up a new agenda, some of it to my liking, other parts not. He wanted me to continue to control the VENONA program, and agreed that we should finally initiate a comprehensive worldwide search for any remaining traffic.
He wanted me to look at Northern Ireland.
"I need one of your bright ideas, Peter," he told me, "see what you can do..."
He wanted me to sit on the Computer Working Party, which was planning the transition of the MI5 Registry into the computer age, a leap into the future due to take place in the mid-1970s. D3 had given me a special insight into the use of the Registry to trace leads, and he wanted me to apply these techniques to computerization.
At first I thought Ireland might give me a new lease of life. I made a couple of trips. It reminded me a lot of Cyprus. A fierce, insoluble conflict made worse by a vacillating British policy. At the time I first went, the Government were telling the world that the situation was getting better. I spent a fortnight reviewing the records of all explosions over a twelve-month period. I drew a graph and proved conclusively that the weight of explosives being detonated was a steeply ascending curve. So much for an improved security situation!
But, as in Cyprus, the Army and the politicians simply refused to face reality.
The only major recommendation I made was that we should devise a system of tapping the telephone lines of the Irish Republic. Lines across the border were well covered, but vital Provisional IRA communications flowed back and forth from the west coast of the Republic to Dublin. I devised a scheme for intercepting the microwaves from the attic of the British Embassy in Dublin using a device no larger than a packing case, but although MI5 endorsed the plan, the Foreign Office vetoed it. This was in the period leading up to what became the Sunningdale Agreement, and the Foreign Office were terrified that news of the plan might leak. I pointed out to them that the basic lesson from Cyprus had been the inherent instability of political solutions negotiated without a decisive security advantage, but they would not listen. It was no surprise to me when Sunningdale collapsed.
I lost heart once the Dublin scheme fell through. It seemed to me a measure of how far the bureaucrats had taken control. Twenty years before, we would have tackled it without any worries at all. I did suggest examining the possibilities of planting booby-trapped detonators on the Provisionals. It would have been a feasible operation in conjunction with MI6, along the same lines as the Cyprus plan to plant fake receivers on Grivas. But even the MI5 management took fright, and refused to investigate the plan any further.
"That's murder," I was told.
"Innocent people are being killed and maimed every day," I said. "Which policy do you think the British people would like us to pursue?"
The Irish situation was only one part of a decisive shift inside MI5 toward domestic concerns. The growth of student militancy in the 1960s gave way to industrial militancy in the early 1970s. The miners' strike of 1972, and a succession of stoppages in the motorcar industry, had a profound effect on the thinking of the Heath Government. Intelligence on domestic subversion became the overriding priority.
This is the most sensitive area a Director-General of MI5 can get into, and it requires a strong man to maintain his own independence and that of the Service. Hanley, through the circumstances of his appointment, was ill-equipped to deal with this pressure. Whereas F.J. was always a champion of MI5's independence, Hanley resolved to do what his masters wanted, and he set about providing them with as professional and extensive a source of domestic intelligence as was possible.
Traditionally, K Branch was MI5's prestige department and F Branch its poor relation, shunned by the brightest officers, and run shambolically by an amiable tippler. But Hanley began to pour resources and men into F Branch and away from K Branch. A whole string of brilliant counterespionage officers, including Michael McCaul, was lost forever.
The most significant pointer to this change occurred after I retired, when Sir John Jones was appointed Director-General in 1981. He was the rising star of F Branch in Hanley's new reorganization, and when he secured the top job he was the first Director-General since Hollis to have achieved it without any personal counterespionage experience. He was an F Branch man through and through, and his appointment perfectly illustrated the decisive shift in MI5's center of gravity.
Early on in his tenure as Director-General, Hanley called a meeting of senior staff in A Branch and F Branch to discuss the changing shape of MI5's priorities. The meeting began with a presentation from Hanley on the climate of subversion in the country, and the growth of what he termed the "far and wide left." The Prime Minister and the Home Office, he said, had left him in no doubt that they wanted a major increase in effort on this target. He then handed over to a young and ambitious F Branch officer, David Ransome, who outlined the activities and structure of a host of left-wing splinter groups, like the Workers' Revolutionary Party (WRP) and the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP).
Hanley loved seminars, and the meeting went on for most of the day. The F Branch people wanted a relaxation in the restrictions governing the use of telephone taps and letter intercepts, and a much closer relationship with the Post Office. The enemy was diffuse, and its communications so widespread, that this was the only way they could get to grips with the problem. John Jones was a forceful advocate. F Branch needed all the technical resources currently at the disposal of K Branch, he claimed. Agent running was no longer viable as the principal means of coverage. For a start, he could not infiltrate his officers into these left-wing groups since many of them lived promiscuous lives, and there were some sacrifices even an MI5 officer would not make for his country. If, on the other hand, he recruited agents, there was obviously a much higher risk of publicity and scandal. The only answer was to use massive technical resources. I could see from Hanley's face that he agreed.
I, on the other hand, pushed the value of agents.
"Use agents if you want to keep an eye on these groups," I told Hanley later in private. "You'll be storing up problems for the future if you commit all our technical resources against them. The Post Office can't in the end be trusted as much as our own people. It's bound to go wrong."
It was the same with the Computer Working Party. I soon realized that the main interest F Branch had in the Computer Working Party was to establish widespread computer links, principally with the National Insurance computer in Newcastle. In the past, of course, we had always been able to get material from the National Insurance records if we really wanted it. We had a couple of undercover officers posted up there who could be contacted for our files. But establishing a direct computer link was something completely different.