The first thing I did was to institute hearing tests on the women, many of whom were becoming too old for the job. I encouraged those with failing hearing to handle material with a high sound quality, such as the telephone intercepts. I gave the corrupted microphone transcription to younger officers, of whom undoubtedly the best was Anne Orr-Ewing, who later joined me as a junior officer in the Counterespionage Department. Microphone transcription is difficult because you usually have only one microphone source for a multichannel conversation. I decided to design a piece of equipment to ease this problem. I went out to an electronics exhibition at Olympia and bought a tape machine which provided two heads. The second head gave a constant number of milliseconds (or more) delay on the sound as it went through, making it much fuller-bodied. In effect it simulated stereo sound, and made even the worst tapes much easier to understand. I installed the equipment on the seventh floor, and it made me a friend for life in Mrs. Grist.
It was my first small victory for science. But beneath the seventh floor the great MI5 antique showroom slumbered on, undisturbed.
The Department which required most urgent attention, and yet resisted modernization with the greatest determination, was A4. Since the war the Watchers had been outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the increasing numbers of Soviet and Soviet satellite diplomats on the streets of London. My first priority was to make a full review of the way the Watchers operated.
I made arrangements to visit one of the MI5 observation posts in an MI5 house opposite one of the main gates of the Russian Embassy in Kensington Park Gardens. The observation post was in an upstairs bedroom. Two Watchers sat on either side of the window. A camera and telephoto lens on a tripod stood permanently trained down onto the street below. Both men were in shirt-sleeves, binoculars hanging around their necks. They looked tired. It was the end of their shift; the ashtrays were full to overflowing, and the table standing between them was scattered with coffee cups.
As each Russian diplomat came out of the gates of Kensington Park Gardens one or the other of the men scrutinized him through binoculars. As soon as he had been accurately identified, the observation post radioed his name back to Watcher headquarters in the form of an enciphered five-figure number. All the numbers of people leaving Kensington Park Gardens were called out on the radio. Each car or Watcher was tagged with certain numbers to follow. When one of his numbers came up he would follow the person involved without replying to the broadcast. The person being followed did not know if he was a target or not. The radio crackled intermittently as one of the mobile Watcher units parked in the streets nearby was ordered to pick up the diplomat as he made his way out of sight of the observation post toward the West End.
The Watchers who manned these static posts had done the job for years. They developed extraordinary memories for faces, instantly recognizing KGB officers who had been out of Britain for years. To assist them in identification the post had three bound volumes containing the photographs and identities of every single Russian intelligence officer known to have visited the UK. Those currently resident in the Embassy were flagged in plastic holders for easy reference. If an unknown face was noted entering or leaving the premises, it was photographed and handed over to MI5's Research Section, and the endless process of identification would begin from scratch. It was numbing work, requiring patience and dedication. But none was more vital. If the Registry is MI5's central nervous system, the Watchers are its fingertips. They must be constantly outstretched, feeling out the contours of the enemy's formations.
The bound volumes of Russian intelligence officer identifications were the product of decades of careful intelligence gathering from every possible source - visa photos, defectors, double agents, or whatever. The faces stared mordantly from the pages. They were mostly KGB or NKVD strong-arm men, interspersed with the occasional cultured, European-looking resident or uniformed military attache. It soon struck me that the observation posts were relying mostly on photographs available from the Russians' diplomatic passports. These were always sent to MI5 but were often of poor quality, or deliberately out of date, and made identification difficult to determine.
I suggested that the Watchers expand their selection of action stills. These are often much easier to recognize than mug shots. This was graphically illustrated in the Klaus Fuchs case. When Fuchs had confessed in 1949 to passing details about atomic weapons, he began to cooperate. MI5 tried to obtain details of his co-conspirators and showed him a passport photograph of Harry Greenglass, a fellow atom spy. Fuchs genuinely failed to recognize him until he was provided with a series of action stills.
For many years MI5 had realized that if Watchers operated from Leconfield House they could be followed from the building and identified by Russian countersurveillance teams. They were housed in an unmarked four-story Georgian house in an elegant terrace in Regent's Park. The central control room was dominated by a vast street map of London on one wall which was used to monitor the progress of operations. In the middle of the room was the radio console which maintained communications with all observation posts and mobile Watcher teams.
On one floor Jim Skardon, the Head of the Watchers, had his office. Skardon was a dapper, pipe-smoking former policeman. He had originally been a wartime MI5 interrogator, and in the immediate postwar period had been the chief interrogator in a number of important cases, particularly that of Klaus Fuchs. Skardon had a high opinion of his own abilities, but he was an immensely popular man to work for. There was something of the manner of a trade union shop steward about him. He felt that the Watchers did arduous and difficult work, and needed protection from exploitation by hungry case officers back at Leconfield House. In a sense this was true. There were around a hundred Watchers when I joined the Service, but the demand for their services was unquenchable in every part of MI5's activity. But I soon came to feel that Skardon was not facing up to the modern reality of watching on the streets of London. It was quite clear that the Russians, in particular, operated very extensive countersurveillance to prevent their agents from being followed. Having watched the system for a few weeks I doubted that the Watchers, using their current techniques, had any realistic chance of following anyone without speedy detection.
When I first raised the question with Skardon of extensively remodeling the Watchers, he dismissed it out of hand. MI5 sections were like fiefdoms, and Skardon took it as an affront to his competence and authority. Eventually he agreed to allow Hugh Winterborn and me to mount an operation to test the effectiveness of current Watcher techniques. We split a team into two groups. The first group was given a photograph of an MI5 officer who was unknown to them and told to follow him. The second group was told the general area in which the first group was operating. They were instructed to locate them and then identify the person they were following. We did this exercise three times, and each time the second group made the identification correctly. We filmed the third experiment and showed it at Watcher headquarters to the whole Department. It did at least remove any remaining doubts that Watcher operations, as currently organized, were perilously vulnerable to countersurveillance.