I was in no doubt from RAFTER, the technique of which I explained in the report at some length, that the monitoring of our Watcher communications was a major source of intelligence for the Russians about MI5, and had been so for a number of years. It definitely explained the Pribyl "driving test" story, and almost certainly accounted for the Russian knowledge of Operation COVERPOINT, although our traffic analysts doubted that the Russians would have been able to deduce that we were following Russians from the Thames bridges so quickly from monitoring our transmissions alone. But the failure of Pribyl to meet Linney, the speed with which the Russians detected the new Watcher radio frequency when we had it changed, and the Lulakov/Morrow affair were all open to varying interpretations. The balance of probability was that there was not a two-legged source in addition to the intelligence derived from monitoring our Watcher communications, but the possibility could not be ruled out.
A day or two after I submitted my report, Hollis summoned me to his office. He was hunched over a file, scratching at it with a fountain pen, when I entered the room. He did not look up. I stood there like an errant schoolboy while he continued to write. The room had not changed much since Dick White vacated it. There was an additional portrait on the wall reserved for venerable Directors-General. A single photograph of Hollis' son stood on his desk alongside the three telephones which connected him to the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defense, and MI6. But other than that there was no stamp of personality.
"Thank you for your report, Peter," said Hollis without looking up. He sounded a different man from when he had handed me the Tisler file earlier in the year. The crisis was clearly over. He was back in charge. He went on writing.
"I've written to Hoover outlining a broad explanation for Tisler's material about the MI5 spy," he went on, "but I think it would be a good idea if you went over and briefed their technical staff on the background to the case, RAFTER, that sort of thing. Make it a useful trip, won't you. Get around and make some friends."
He looked up and smiled suddenly.
"It's good to know we've been one step ahead of them this time. Well done."
He went back to his file, signaling that our brief encounter had ended. I turned to leave the room.
"Oh, and Peter..." he said as I reached the door, "stick to the technical findings, won't you. I don't think we should give Hoover the impression that anything is... unresolved."
"Of course not, sir. I quite understand."
I did not know it then, but the first stone had been cast.
The Capitol building was a giant fresco of pink blossom, blue sky, and white marble, capped by a shining dome. I always loved visiting Washington, especially in the spring. London was so drab; MI5 so class-ridden and penny-pinching. Like many of the younger, postwar recruits to secret intelligence, I felt America was the great hope, the hub of the Western intelligence wheel. I welcomed her ascendancy with open arms.
Ironically, relations between British and American Intelligence in the late 1950s were at their lowest postwar ebb. Collaboration between MI6 and the CIA had virtually collapsed after the Suez Crisis, and they found themselves increasingly in conflict, not just in the Middle East but in the Far East and Africa as well. Many of the old guard in MI6 found it hard to accept that their wartime control of the Anglo-American intelligence relationship had long since given way to junior status.
Relations between MI5 and the CIA were fraught for different reasons. The CIA was a new organization, flexing its muscles on the world stage for the first time. Its aim was to collect intelligence, and although it was not supposed to operate in London without notifying MI5, both Hollis and Dick White believed the CIA flouted this understanding.
Behind all the difficulties lay the simmering distrust created by the defections of Burgess and Maclean, and the public clearance of Kim Philby. MI6 could never be seen in the same light again, particularly as so many senior officers had been close friends of Philby, whereas MI5's failure to apprehend any of the three made it seem, to American eyes, almost criminally incompetent. Only GCHQ, which had a formal charter of cooperation with its American counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA), under the terms of the 1948 UK USA agreement, remained relatively immune to the turbulent currents which battered the previously intimate wartime Anglo-American intelligence relationship.
When Hollis became Director-General he tried manfully to improve relations with the FBI. Hoover was famously anti-British, stemming from the war, when British Security Coordination (BSC) was set up in New York under Sir William Stephenson, the so-called Man Called Intrepid. BSC operated against the Germans in the United States, but Hoover vehemently opposed the idea of any organization, let alone one which was foreign controlled, having rights to collect intelligence on American soil. For years he refused to associate with Stephenson's staff. The Burgess and Maclean affair reinforced Hoover's prejudices, and for a while MI6 officers were not even allowed on FBI premises, and MI5 were prohibited access to any FBI intelligence source reports.
In 1956 Hollis visited Hoover in an attempt to improve relations, and persuade him to place MI5 on the distribution list again. Oddly enough, Hollis and Hoover got on rather well. They were both sensitive to any encroachments on their respective empires, yet Hollis had an essential weakness of character which enabled him to play the earnest supplicant to Hoover's blustering bully. Hoover, like many self-made Americans, had a strong streak of snobbery, and his gargantuan conceit was stroked by the sight of an English upper-class spymaster with his cap outstretched.
I became an important peace offering. Hollis claimed my appointment as MI5's first scientist was proof of his intention to modernize the Service and step up the fight against Soviet espionage. Following Hollis's visit, Hoover invited me to visit FBI headquarters to see the range of their technical equipment. I was very keen to make the trip, as I believed from my first day inside MI5 that the key to long-term success lay in restoring relations with the Americans, so that we could gain access to their technical resources. But my views were not popular. Delusions of Empire still ran strongly inside Leconfield House. Cumming, for instance, although Head of MI5's technical branch, never visited the United States, and saw no reason to do so.
My first impression of the FBI was the sheer scale of the technical resources at their disposal, far beyond anything MI5 could ever imagine. But for all their riches, I could not help feeling that they made poor use of them. They relied almost entirely on commercially available equipment, rather than developing their own. Their radios were standard Motorola equipment used in police cars and taxis, although they had an impressive microwave network which connected the various FBI stations across the USA The one really interesting part of FBI technical work was the use they made of fingerprints in espionage investigations. There were no fingerprint records in the MI5 Registry, and I felt it was one area where the FBI's quasi-police identity gave it an advantage.
Dick Millen was the FBI officer who ran their technical research. Millen was a lawyer rather than a scientist by training, which limited his effectiveness, but he put on a splendid show. I was taken down to the firing range in the basement of FBI headquarters, and given a lesson in pistol-firing techniques. Millen proudly informed me that even "the old man himself," Hoover, regularly practiced his prowess. I was taken down to the FBI training depot on the Maryland coast, where an old American Indian taught FBI agents advanced gunslinging. He demonstrated his skills, shooting targets in mirrors, and firing over his shoulder at a ping pong ball perched on the top of a water fountain. It was rugged, all-American stuff, and the FBI's roots in the lawlessness of 1930s America were never far from the surface. But I somehow doubted that it had much to do with modern counterespionage.