"Good thing we removed our shoes," quipped Winterborn dryly as laughter began to echo around the empty building.
Luckily the neighbors must have been asleep, because no policemen arrived. Leslie Jagger quickly repaired the lath work, replastering and repainting the damage before morning with his quick-drying materials.
"Close shave, that one, Peter," he said as he applied the final lick of paint. "If you'd come through the ornamental rose we'd have been absolutely buggered."
But accidents like these were rare occurrences. In the main, MI5 technical operations became, under Hugh and me, highly professional, in sharp contrast to MI6 activities in the same field. MI6, in the mid 1950s, never settled for a disaster if calamity could be found instead. The best example I ever heard concerned one of their training operations. They placed a junior officer in an MI6 flat, and detailed another team of recruits to find and interrogate him. MI5 were always routinely informed about these operations in case anything went wrong.
One afternoon A2 got a phone call from MI6 pleading for help. The MI6 search party had apparently miscounted the floors of the apartment block where their target was holed up. They picked the lock of the flat one floor above, and proceeded to go to work on the man inside. He, of course, protested his innocence, but believing this to be part of the ruse, the search party consulted the MI6 textbook marked "persuasion," and went to work as only enthusiastic amateurs can. By the time they had finished, the man was stripped naked and singing like a bird. He was, in reality, a jewel thief, who had recently pulled off a diamond robbery. He produced the baubles still in his possession, obviously believing that his captors were visitors from a vengeful underworld.
Hugh Winterborn split his sides laughing as the unfortunate MI6 officer begged for advice on what to do with the jewel thief, the diamonds, and a wrecked flat. In the end the thief was given two hours to make for the Continent and Leslie Jagger went over to the flat and repaired the damage.
After I had been in A2 for two or three years, MI6 began to call on me to help them plan their technical operations. I never much enjoyed working with MI6. They invariably planned operations which, frankly, stood little chance of technical success. They were always looking for a successor to the Berlin Tunnel - something on the epic scale which would have the Americans thirsting to share in the product. But they never found it, and in the process failed to build a sensible bedrock of smaller successes. There was, too, a senseless bravado about the way they behaved which I felt often risked the security of the operations. In Bonn, for instance, we were planning a DEW WORM-style operation on the Russian Embassy compound.
Local MI6 station officers wandered onto the site and even, on one occasion, engaged the KGB security guards in casual conversation. It made for good dining-out stories, but contributed little to the weekly ministerial intelligence digests. The foolhardiness was invariably punctuated by flights of absurd pomposity. In Bonn I made the perfectly sensible suggestion that we should use German cable so that if the operation were discovered MI6 could disown it and blame it on the local intelligence service.
"Good Lord, Peter! We can't do that," gushed the MI6 station chief with his nose in the air. "It wouldn't be ethical."
Ethics, so far as I could ascertain, were displayed by MI6 purely for Whitehall or MI5 consumption. In fact MI6, under its chief, Sir John Sinclair, had become a virtual liability. It still refused to face up to the appalling consequences of Philby's being a Soviet spy. It was operating in the modern world with 1930s attitudes and 1930s personnel and equipment. It was little surprise to me when they stumbled, in April 1956, into their greatest blunder of all, the Crabbe affair.
The Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin paid a visit to Britain on the battleship ORDZHONIKIDZE, docking at Portsmouth. The visit was designed to improve Anglo-Soviet relations at a sensitive time. MI5 decided to operate against Khrushchev in his rooms at Claridge's Hotel. Normally Claridge's has permanent Special Facilities installed on the hotel telephone system, because so many visitors stay there who are of interest to MI5. But we knew the Russians were sending a team of sweepers in to check Khrushchev's suite before he arrived, so we decided it was the right time to use for the first time the specially modified SF which John Taylor had developed in the Dollis Hill Laboratory. The new SF did not require a washer to be fitted, so it was virtually undetectable. The telephone could be activated over short distances using shortwave high-frequency megacycles. We set the SF activation up in an office of the Grosvenor Estates near Claridge's. It worked perfectly. Throughout Khrushchev's visit his room was permanently covered. In fact, the intelligence gathered was worthless. Khrushchev was far too canny a bird to discuss anything of value in a hotel room. I remember sitting up on the seventh floor with a transcriber translating loosely for me. We listened to Khrushchev for hours at a time, hoping for pearls to drop. But there were no clues to the last days of Stalin, or to the fate of the KGB henchman Beria. Instead, there were long monologues from Khrushchev addressed to his valet on the subject of his attire. He was an extraordinarily vain man. He stood in front of the mirror preening himself for hours at a time, and fussing with his hair parting. I recall thinking that in Eden, Khrushchev had found the perfect match. Both were thoroughly unscrupulous men, whose only interest lay in cutting a dash on the world stage.
But while MI5 were discreetly bugging Khrushchev, MI6 launched a botched operation against the ORDZHONIKIDZE. The operation was run by the MI6 London Station, commanded by Nicholas Elliott, the son of the former headmaster of Eton. MI6 wanted to measure the propeller of the Russian battleship, because there was confusion in the Admiralty as to why she was able to travel so much faster than had originally been estimated by Naval Intelligence. Elliott arranged for a frogman, the unfortunate Commander "Buster" Crabbe, to take on the assignment.
In fact, this was not the first time MI6 had attempted this operation. A year before, they tried to investigate the hull of the ORDZHONIKIDZE while she was in port in the Soviet Union. They used one of the X-Craft midget submarines which MI6 kept down in Stokes Bay. These had dry compartments to enable a diver to get in and out and were small enough to pass undetected into inshore waters. A Naval frogman had attempted to enter the harbor, but security was too tight and the mission was aborted.