We suggested to Skardon that as a first step he should employ a number of women. A great deal of watching involves sitting for hours in pubs, cafes, and parks, waiting or monitoring meetings. A man and a woman would be far less conspicuous than a single man or a pair of men. Skardon opposed the plan strongly. He feared it might introduce extramarital temptations which might adversely affect the morale of his team.
"The wives won't like it," he said grimly.
Hugh Winterborn scoffed.
"So what if they kiss and cuddle. It's better for the cover!"
Skardon was not amused. The other reform we wanted implemented was in the way Watchers were debriefed. It was never done immediately they came in from a job. Sometimes it was overnight, sometimes even at the end of the week. I pointed out to Skardon that it had been proved again and again in wartime that debriefing had to be done immediately to be accurate. If there is a delay the memory stops recollecting what happened and begins to rationalize how it happened.
"My boys have done eight hours slogging the streets. They don't want to come back and spend hours answering questions when they can write up a report themselves," he stormed. In the end he did agree to bring them back from each shift fifteen minutes early, but it was a constant struggle.
The mobile Watchers presented different problems. I went out for the day with them to get an idea of the work. MI5 cars were inconspicuous models, but they were fitted with highly tuned engines in the MI5 garages in Battersea. Every three months the cars were resprayed to disguise their identities, and each car carried a selection of number plates, which were changed at intervals during the week.
It was boyish fun chasing Russian diplomatic vehicles through the streets of London, up and down one-way streets and through red traffic lights, secure in the knowledge that each driver carried a Police Pass to avoid tickets. The driver of my car told with great glee the story of how he had been following a Russian car down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace on a winter day. The Russian had slammed on his brakes to go around the roundabout, and the cars had skidded into each other. Both sides got out and exchanged particulars with poker faces. The knack of mobile following is to pick the parallel streets wherever possible. But in the end the success of the operation depends on the radio control at headquarters. They have to predict the likely path of the Russian car, so that reserve units can be called in to pick up the chase.
The first problem with mobile watching was quite simple. There were three men in each car, and since so much of the time was spent parked on street corners, or outside premises, the cars stood out like sore thumbs. Once again, Winterborn and I made a field study. We went to an area where we knew the Watchers were operating. Within half an hour we had logged every car. One was particularly easy. The number plates had recently been changed. But the driver had forgotten to change them both over! I suggested to Skardon that he cut down the number of men in the cars, but in true British Leyland style he gave me a lecture on how it was essential to have three men.
"There's one to drive, one to read the map, and the third to operate the radio," he said with conviction, seemingly unaware of the absurdity of it all.
But there was one area which decidedly was not a joke, and which gave me more worry than all the others put together. Communications are any intelligence organization's weakest link. The Watchers relayed hundreds of messages daily to and from the observation posts, the cars, and headquarters. The first thing which made them vulnerable was that they were never acknowledged. The Russians could easily identify Watcher communications by simply searching the wavebands for unacknowledged call signs. MI6 were just as bad abroad. For a long time the best way of identifying MI6 staff in the Embassy was to check which diplomats used outside lines which were not routed through the main switchboard. Later, MI5 brought in a complicated system of enciphering Watcher communications. I pointed out that this made no difference, since their signals would now stand out even more against the Police, Fire and Ambulance Service communications, all of which were en clair (uncoded). They did not seem to understand that the Russians were gathering most of the intelligence from the traffic itself, rather than from the contents of the messages. Traffic analysis would tell them when and where a following operation was being conducted, and by cross-checking that with their own records they would learn all they needed to know.
I lobbied hard for a major effort to be mounted to try to find out if the Russians were systematically monitoring Watcher communications. Theoretically it was a feasible thing to do, because any receiver will give off a certain radiation which can be detected at short distances. I raised my plan through the correct channels with GCHQ, which had the technical apparatus and manpower necessary for such an experiment. I waited for months before I got what was described as a "considered" answer. GCHQ's verdict was that it was not technically feasible to conduct such experiments. It was another two years before GCHQ and MI5 realized how wrong that judgment was.
In the meantime I remained a worried man. If Watcher communications were vulnerable, and Watcher tradecraft as poor as we had shown it to be, then MI5 had to assume that a substantial part of its counterespionage effort had been useless over many years. At least some operations in which Watchers had been used had to have been detected by the Russians. But which, and how many?
In the trenches of the Cold War, A2 was MI5's front line, Hugh Winterborn and I its storm troopers. Hugh Winterborn was a fine comrade in arms. He had served with the Army in China and Japan and in Ceylon and Burma before joining MI5, and spoke Chinese and Japanese fluently. Winterborn was a Field Marshal manque. His operations were always beautifully planned right down to the last detail, and although often complex, were invariably executed with military precision. But he was not a dry man. He approached each operation with the purpose of gathering intelligence, but also to have fun. And we did have fun. For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.
Winterborn and I were a perfect match, both sharing a fervent belief that modernization was badly needed at almost every level of the Service, and especially in the technical field. I tended to concentrate on ideas. He acted as the foil, winnowing out the sensible from the impractical in my suggestions and planning how to make them operational reality.
When I first teamed up with Winterborn he was bubbling over with news of the latest A2 job he had completed, called Operation PARTY PIECE. It had been a typical Winterborn operation - thoroughness and outrageous good fortune linked harmoniously together. One of the F4 agent runners learned, from a source inside the Communist Party of Great Britain, that the entire Party secret membership files were stored in the flat of a wealthy Party member in Mayfair. A2 were called in to plan an operation to burgle the flat and copy the files.
The flat was put under intensive visual, telephone, and letter surveillance, and in due course MI5 had a stroke of unexpected luck. The woman of the house rang her husband at work to say that she was going out for an hour. She told him she would leave the key under the mat. Within twenty minutes of the call's being monitored in Leconfield House, we were around at the flat taking a plasticine imprint of the key.
The burglary was carefully arranged for a time when the occupants were away for a weekend in the Lake District. Winterborn sent a team of Watchers to monitor the occupants in case they decided to return home early. Banks of pedal-operated microfilming machines were set up in Leconfield House ready to copy the files. A team from A2 entered the flat and picked the locks of the filing cabinets where the membership files were kept. The contents of each drawer of each cabinet were photographed with a Polaroid camera. Each file was carefully removed and indexed in the flat so that it could be replaced in the identical spot. Then they were removed in bundles and driven over to Leconfield House for copying in sequential order. In all, 55,000 files were copied that weekend, and the result was a priceless haul of information about the Communist Party.