Part of Wilson’s mistrust of MI5 stemmed from his discovery of the Fluency Committee’s investigations of Sir Roger Hollis during the sixties, something of which he wasn’t aware at the time, but felt with hindsight he should have been. The prime minister’s relationship with Hanley deteriorated to such an extent that the Director-General considered resigning. By December 1975, Wilson’s official biography notes that he was convinced there was a plot and he was ‘reasonably certain that elements of MI5 were doing the donkey work, though at what level he did not know’, and he began turning on all the taps in the lavatory before saying anything in there.
Things weren’t improved when George Young, the former Deputy Chief of MI6, announced in March 1976 that three of Wilson’s ministers were crypto-Communists, and it’s possible that after Wilson was briefed about Young’s right-wing connections, and links to journalist Chapman Pincher, he got his services confused and discussed a plot to discredit him by ‘a very small MI5 mafia who had been out of the Service for some time who still continue their vendetta for no doubt very right wing purposes of their own’.
Wilson continued to protest he had been the subject of a conspiracy after his resignation, and cooperated with two journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, preparing a story that they printed in the Observer newspaper, which attacked MI5, and included the fact that Wilson had turned to the head of the CIA for help investigating the plot against him. Prime Minister James Callaghan instituted an internal inquiry, then reported to the House of Commons that it was clear there was nothing to the allegations.
This might have been seen as nothing more than the early onset of the illness that would torment Wilson during his retirement had it not been for Peter Wright’s book, in which it was claimed that thirty MI5 officers had given their approval to a plot against Wilson. Again, this was investigated, and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher categorically denied the allegations: ‘No evidence or indication has been found of any plot or conspiracy against Lord Wilson by or within the Security Service.’
Talking on documentary programme Panorama in October 1988, Wright admitted that in fact there was probably only one other member of MI5 who wanted to get rid of Wilson, and that his book was ‘unreliable’. However, that didn’t get anything like the publicity of the Observer article, and there are still many who believe MI5 were actively plotting — the book and TV series A Very British Coup suggest how such a plot might have played out.
Faith in its country’s security service was also lacking during this time in Australia, with the head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), William T. Robertson, forced to resign over the use of an Australian agent in East Timor’s affairs in 1975. ASIS had been established in 1952 as a collector of foreign intelligence, primarily in the Asian-Pacific region, and like MI6 in Britain, it did not officially exist. During the sixties and early seventies it monitored Communist groups and paramilitary groups in Indonesia.
In the build-up to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, ASIS employed local businessman Frank Favaro to supply information on local political developments. However, he was quite unstable and in September 1975, ASIS fired him. Favaro wanted more money for the work he had done, and wrote to the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and the Foreign Minister, Don Willessee, who stated in Parliament that Favaro was a private citizen who didn’t represent the Australian government in any capacity. When Whitlam realized that ASIS had indeed hired Favaro and risked a charge of interfering in another country’s affairs, without obtaining his authority, he demanded Robertson’s resignation. When Whitlam was removed from office by the Governor General in November 1975, the new prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, claimed that the Robertson sacking was ‘a powerful argument that Whitlam was not fit to govern’.
‘We are bogged down in a war we cannot win and cannot abandon,’ one KGB general admitted privately a few years after the invasion of Afghanistan, noting that the 1979 action had led to their equivalent of the Vietnam War. And, although it wasn’t said publicly, this was the KGB’s fault.
As well as spying on the ‘Main Adversary’, the KGB was still charged with maintaining order around the Communist countries, and it became clear during 1979 that despite a Communist coup the previous April, the regime of Hafizullah Amin was precarious. The KGB residency in Kabul predicted that an anti-Soviet Islamic Republic (similar to that which had taken power in Iran the previous year) could well replace the regime unless Amin in Afghanistan went. Despite the best efforts of Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Talebov to poison him, Amin survived.
On Christmas Day 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, with KGB Alpha Anti-Terrorist assault commandos at their head, disguised as Afghans. In an echo of CIA actions in the sixties, they broadcast radio messages purporting to come from the government, calling for Soviet assistance. This the Soviets duly provided, creating a new regime — and the KGB helped the Afghans to set up a more organized Security Service, the Khedamat-e Etela’at-e Dawltai (KHAD) ‘to protect democratic freedoms… as well as to neutralise… the plots hatched by external enemies of Afghanistan’. In practice this meant the Soviets taught their new pupils the worst excesses of torture.
The KGB had anticipated that the invasion would go like earlier such incursions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Like many before — and since — they underestimated the will of the Afghan people. Instead of a quick and easy operation, KGB officers would be bogged down in Afghanistan for the next decade and as a result of the invasion, relations between East and West would hit a new low. Spies on all sides of the Cold War would be affected.
10
THE EMPIRES STRIKE BACK
The first half of the eighties was a time of mounting tension. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had led to the US and others boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and when the former Governor of California Ronald Reagan was voted into the White House later that year, the anti-Soviet rhetoric was dialled up.
In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, in March 1983, Reagan made reference to an ‘evil empire… [who] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.’ The Soviet news agency TASS responded that Reagan ‘can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-communism’. The militaries in both West and East were built up. At the same time as the ‘evil empire’ speech, Reagan authorized the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) (commonly known as ‘Star Wars’ after the George Lucas film), which the new Soviet leader Yuri Andropov said ‘put the entire world in jeopardy’.
Politically, the Soviet Union went through major changes. Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982 and was succeeded by KGB Chief Andropov — but he too would die in office, a mere two years later. Konstantin Chernenko, a crony of Brezhnev’s, followed for a short time, then on his death, Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed in March 1985. Although it wasn’t clear to anyone at the time, Gorbachev’s policies would lead to the end of the Cold War.
The stakes were raised for the intelligence agencies on either side of the Iron Curtain, with the CIA changing course once more and increasing the amount of HUMINT (human intelligence) on which they were relying (partly caused by the blows to SIGINT abilities following Ronald Pelton’s defection in 1980). However 1985 would prove to be a watershed in the espionage game, with a series of recruitments and betrayals by both sides.