In his debriefing, Lyalin identified dozens of KGB officers active under diplomatic cover. Most of these identifications were already known to us through the Movements Analysis program, which I had helped establish in the early 1960s with Arthur Martin and Hal Doyne Ditmass.
Calculating KGB strength has always been a contentious business, and yet it lies at the heart of a rational assessment of the threat posed by hostile intelligence. When I ran D3 I made a series of analyses of Soviet strength in 1945, based on the VENONA material. Although we broke only a small fraction of the traffic, GCHQ were able to statistically assess the total number of spies active in Britain at between 150 and 300. (The statistical analysis was conducted using methodology devised by one of the top cryptographers, I.J. Good.) By the 1960s, through rough analysis of the VENONA, and through comparing intelligence provided by defectors, as well as Blunt and Cairncross, with our own passport records, we were confident that there were between forty-five and fifty Russian intelligence officers in London in 1945, of whom about twenty-five were agent runners. Dividing this into the number of spies demonstrated in the VENONA gave a median figure of around eight to nine spies per agent runner, which dovetailed neatly with the one week of VENONA traffic which demonstrated that Krotov was running eight spies.
Now the real question is how far those figures can be extrapolated into modern times. By the late 1960s the Movements Analysis program was indicating between 450 and 550 Russian intelligence officers active in Britain. But what percentage of those were agent runners? Even if we assumed that the number of agent runners had remained static over a twenty-year period, at around twenty-five, and that the rest were there to provide cover, countersurveillance, internal security, and analysis, this still left us facing a huge problem. It meant that there were upward of 200 spies currently active in Britain. If we took the figure of agent runners to have expanded commensurately with the rise in total numbers of intelligence officers, the situation was even more alarming - more than a thousand spies! Of course, the vast majority of those spies would be low-level contacts among the Communist Party and various trade unions, but if even 1 percent were penetrations of the level of Houghton or Vassall, the implications were disastrous.
Whenever I placed these analyses forward to the Home Office for inclusion in the routine threat assessments, there was strife. John Allen, a former lawyer, and fast rising in K Branch, repeatedly disputed my analysis.
"You can't say that, there can't be that many IOs in London, the Home Office will never believe it!"
But Lyalin's defection removed all the objections. He confirmed the Movements Analysis figure of around 450 intelligence officers based in London, and maintained that a large percentage were active agent runners. He proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the Movements Analysis program was quite correct and my statistical arguments valid. It was also apparent that not all the increase was in low-level spies. With greater determination than I ever saw him pursue anything, F.J. put to the Foreign Office the case for mass expulsions of a large number of the Russian diplomats. In the end, Ted Heath and the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, agreed, after a discreet approach by Home to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Alexei Kosygin, suggesting the Russians remove some of their intelligence officers without publicity was brushed aside imperiously.
The expulsions were seen as a brilliant coup throughout the Western intelligence world, and we received telegrams of congratulation from the heads of every Service. It was F.J.'s greatest triumph, made sweeter because the fact that the plan had clearly not leaked to the Russians proved that, whatever the truth of the past, high-level penetration of MI5 was definitely at an end.
Angleton supported the expulsions unreservedly, and confessed that he had long wanted to engineer something similar in Washington. But Henry Kissinger was a firm opponent. Angleton told me that Kissinger had exploded when he learned of the British expulsions. He was desperately pursuing detente with the USSR, and minuted the CIA angrily, telling them that had he known of the proposal he would have used every power at his command to get it quashed. Luckily, the CIA were able to state truthfully that they had known nothing of the plan.
But Angleton was deeply suspicious of Lyalin. After the defection Angleton paid a secret visit to London. He looked worse than ever, consumed by the dark, foreboding role he was committed to playing. He viewed himself as a kind of Cassandra preaching doom and decline for the West. He thought Lyalin was a plant, and told us all so at a meeting in Marlborough Street.
"Oh come on, Jim," I said, "Lyalin's just not that big. He's a KGB thug, what possible disinformation interest could they have in him?"
Angleton felt betrayed. We had not told him about Lyalin while we were running him in place, and he told us stiffly that the whole purpose of UKUSA was the full exchange of intelligence. Patience with Angleton was rapidly wearing thin in London in 1970. Maurice Oldfield had an ill-concealed hostility to all his ideas and theories, and even inside MI5 he had begun to make enemies.
We learned later just how far he was prepared to go to discredit Lyalin. As Lyalin was debriefed, we routinely sent over our intelligence digests containing his material to the FBI for circulation through to the CIA, and on to the National Security Council and up to the President.
Some months later, J. Edgar Hoover took a vacation in Florida, and took the opportunity to call on President Nixon at his holiday home on Key Biscayne.
"How do you like the British reports from their source Lyalin, Mr. President?"
"What reports?" replied Nixon. He had never received them.
When Hoover checked back with Kissinger, he had not received them either. Kissinger got on to the CIA and instituted a full search. They were finally found in Angleton's safe. He had concluded Lyalin was a provocation, and simply refused to circulate the documents. Tom Karamasines, the CIA Director of Plans, issued a stern rebuke, and it was the beginning of Angleton's slide from power.
The roots of his demise lay much earlier in the Golitsin-Nossenko feud. For Angleton it became an article of faith that Nossenko was a plant, since that ensured Golitsin primacy among all the defectors who arrived in the early 1960s. I remember in 1967, after the first CAZAB conference, telling Angleton that I was traveling back to Britain via the USA. My daughter was living in Boston, and I thought I would combine some business with a purely personal visit. As soon as I told Angleton I was visiting Washington he became quite aggressive. He told me I had no right to visit Washington unless he was in town. At the time I thought his worry was to do with the Israelis. The Middle Eastern situation was brewing up, and Angleton always jealously protected his relations with the Israeli secret service, Mossad. He knew of my close friendship with Victor Rothschild, and often tried to break it off. On one occasion he even wrote to F.J. to try to curtail it as an interference in the CIA-Mossad liaison, but F.J. treated the letter with the contempt it deserved.