For MI6, undoubtedly the sweetest ROC operation was against the Russian cruiser ORDZHONIKIDZE. Despite the "Buster" Crabbe fiasco in Portsmouth, MI6 remained determined to hunt the ship down. In 1959 she was due to dock in Stockholm, and MI6 learned that the Swedish Signals Intelligence Service were planning to operate against her. The local MI6 Station Chief suggested to the Swedes that Britain might be prepared to offer advanced technical- assistance. Although nominally neutral, the Swedish SIGINT organization retained informal secret liaison with GCHQ, and they gratefully accepted the offer.
I went to Stockholm to plan an ENGULF operation against the ORDZHONIKIDZE cipher machine in 1959. I scuttled along the dockyard in the dead of night, disguised as a Swedish engineer, accompanied by two burly local SIGINT technicians. We also had two GCHQ people with us. We ducked into a warehouse opposite the ORDZHONIKIDZE, and made our way upstairs to the operations room, where the ENGULF equipment had been delivered. We were cooped up in that small room for five days. It was high summer, and the temperature outside was in the nineties. The warehouse had a corrugated-tin roof, and inside we sweltered, finding solace in the crates of extra-strong lager stacked in the refrigerator. Although we detected some cipher noises, we were never able to break the cipher, but MI6 and GCHQ judged the whole operation a success.
"Just like the Mounties," beamed Pat O'Hanlon, the MI6 representative at the next ROC meeting. "We always get our man!"
The scale of RAFTER and ENGULF operations dramatically escalated, as the results of the technical reconnaissances flowed in, and operations based on them proliferated. The Radiations Operations Committee (ROC), comprising the technical staffs of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, was formed in 1960 to coordinate the workload. ROC met once a fortnight, either in Cheltenham or at Leconfield House. I was the first Chairman, although Ray Frawley, a crisp, self-disciplined GCHQ staff officer, took upon himself the task of controlling the flow of business, and he came, before long, to dominate ROC. He was an administrative genius, with none of the hidebound instincts of some of his peers in Cheltenham. He controlled the paperwork, provided the technical resources and the GCHQ operators to man each operation, as well as organizing getting the all-important ministerial clearances.
ROC was one of the most important committees in postwar British Intelligence. For ten years, until the new generation of computers came in at the end of the 1960s, ROC was crucial to much of the success of GCHQ's cryptanalytical effort. But of even greater importance was the way it began to break down the barriers which had previously separated MI5, MI6, and GCHQ at working level. As in the war, British Intelligence once again began to function as a coordinated unit, and as a result was much more successful.
On the research side, too, there were some important improvements in the late 1950s. When I joined MI5, the principal forum for scientific research was the Colemore Committee. Once a year MI6 invited a dozen top scientists from outside the secret world into a safe conference room in Carlton House Terrace. In return for a lavish lunch, MI6 expected these eminent persons to act as private scientific consultants to the Secret Services, providing guidance, ideas, and contacts. As soon as I attended my first Colemore Committee, I could see it was a waste of time. The morning discussion was desultory and unstructured and after a few pints, gins, and lashings of the best claret, few members of the Committee were in a fit state to turn their attention to complex scientific matters. After the day's labors, Peter Dixon took us all out on the town for more feeding and watering. I will always treasure the look on Dick White's face as, toward midnight, we ended up in a less than salubrious club in Soho, featuring what might politely be described as "an exotic cabaret." He smiled wanly at the red-faced gents around the table, but I could see that, like me, he felt it was not the answer to the deep-seated scientific problems facing MI5.
The Colemore Committee had some use as a sounding board, but I realized from the start that MI5 needed a comprehensive in-house research program, properly staffed and properly funded. It seemed to me absurd that the Treasury should expend vast sums on weapons research at the stroke of a pen, and yet balk at the petty sums required by the Secret Services for modernization.
Shortly after I joined MI5 in 1955, I approached Sir Frederick Brundrett again, and asked him for help in obtaining the necessary resources. He was sympathetic, and suggested that my application would stand a better chance if I first made a thorough study of the current state of KGB scientific and technical advances and wrote a paper outlining the areas in which MI5 and MI6 were deficient.
I approached my opposite number in MI6, the H Tech 1, but it was soon obvious that they had very little intelligence on the subject. I decided to make a thorough study of the debriefings of all the German scientists who, at the end of the war, had been forcibly taken back to the Soviet Union and made to work for a number of years in Soviet government laboratories as the price of freedom. These scientists were known as the Dragon Returnees, and their debriefings had provided much useful intelligence about the state of Soviet rocket, jet engine, and nuclear research, since this was the area which the Russians had been most anxious to develop.
I went over to the Defense Scientific Intelligence Unit (DSI), and asked General Strong if I could study the papers. I was shown into a room in Northumberland Avenue which contained all the Dragon material, stacked up in dozens and dozens of dusty volumes. Incredibly, neither MI5 nor MI6 had bothered to process any of this material for its own use.
It took months for me to sort through the Dragon papers, but it was soon obvious that considerable numbers of the Dragon scientists had been detailed to work on technical intelligence research in laboratories on the outskirts of Moscow controlled by the KGB. I drew up a list of specific Dragon scientists I wanted to interview again. The original debriefings were mostly conducted by ordinary British or American military staff, who did not have scientific training or knowledge of the intelligence-collection field, and I was sure that I could obtain more information from them.
I traveled to Germany in 1957, and was met by MI5's senior German representative, Peter Domeisen, who had arranged facilities for the interviews at British Military Intelligence Headquarters in Hanover and Munchen Gladbach. Most intelligence officers loved Germany in the 1950s. It was the front line, and the action was free and easy. But Domeisen was depressed by the growing tension in Berlin, and was convinced that it would not be long before the Russians made another attempt to swallow up the Western sector.
The interviews were difficult and depressing. Many of the scientists were desperate to ingratiate themselves with Britain and America. I stuck very closely to technical questioning, since the opinions they voiced were so obviously shaped to what they felt I wanted to hear. They had undeniably suffered during their incarceration in Moscow, and many of their friends had died. But it was impossible not to remember on whose side they had been working during the war.
One of the first scientists I interviewed was the man who had developed "the Thing," which Americans found in 1950 inside the Great Seal behind the American Ambassador's desk in their Moscow Embassy. It was gratifying to hear him confirm that the device worked exactly as I had predicted that Sunday afternoon in my Marconi Nissen hut. But as I questioned him, I felt again the dismay which ran through MI5 in 1950, when we realized the KGB were already deploying something which was barely at the research stage in Britain.