When Hollis became Director-General in 1956, a new head of D Branch, Martin Furnival Jones, was appointed. Furnival Jones was a lawyer by training, who joined MI5 during the war. On the surface he seemed an orthodox, taciturn man, lacking flair and vigor. But Furnival Jones was easy to underestimate. He had an officer's gift for leadership, and a logical, ordered mind which was surprisingly open to new ideas. But most of all, he possessed a streak of determination, if not ruthlessness, which made him a superb head of counterespionage. He realized that the main problem facing MI5 was the sheer scale of Soviet Bloc intelligence activity in Britain. D1, for instance, had the task of monitoring and working against around 300 Russian intelligence officers. Its total staff was eleven, of whom four were secretaries. We were swamped, never knowing whether we were chasing spies or shadows.
One of his first decisions was to bring Arthur Martin back from the wilderness to Leconfield House, first as D2, in charge of Czech and Polish affairs, and then, in 1959, as D1, responsible for Soviet Counterespionage. Furnival Jones had great admiration for Arthur Martin's skills, and the strength of character to get the best out of him, despite his sometimes truculent manner. Arthur Martin moved quickly to restore D1's emphasis on active counterespionage investigation, and he instinctively grasped the importance of new techniques like RAFTER, having worked in signals intelligence during the war. For the first time, I found someone with seniority who listened sympathetically and acted on my ideas for change. We quickly became close friends. We formed a Resources Index in A Branch, recording anyone and anything which could be of use to MI5. Forms were sent around the office, asking for entries, and over a period of months we built up an index so that a case officer who required, for instance, a nurse, or a plumber, or access to a particular company's files, or a lock-up garage, could consult the index, rather than having to spend time obtaining the resource from scratch.
We made radical changes in the order-of-battle approach, bringing in Movements Analysis, an idea which Terry Guernsey, the RCMP head of counterespionage, first began. This involved logging all known movements of Soviet Embassy personnel to build up an overall picture of their activities. Through this, it was possible to gain important intelligence about the identities of likely KGB officers.
But the most radical changes were made in the Operations section, which was dominated by a brilliant agent runner and investigator, Michael McCaul. Martin and McCaul put the section on a war footing. Even though our forces were so much smaller than the Russians', we went on the offensive, changing our tactics, and aiming to disrupt the KGB, who were accustomed to the utter predictability of our approach. Some of the schemes were madcap, like the operation to pickpocket all known KGB officers on the streets of London, in the hope that scraps of intelligence might be gleaned. It didn't work, but it made the Russians feel they were under attack for the first time in years. Other changes were much more significant. The Soviet emigre networks, undoubtedly the most penetrated of all, were rolled up. The double-agent cases were run much more aggressively. Case officers accompanied double agents to meetings with their KGB controller, and warned the KGB man that if he was caught recruiting British nationals again, he would be reported to the Foreign Office and expelled. McCaul and his men began to make brazen attempts to recruit KGB men. We never succeeded, but the change of tactic was enough, we hoped, to sow the seeds of doubt in Kensington Park Gardens.
McCaul implemented these new tactics brilliantly. On one occasion, a technician who worked in a Royal Ordnance Factory, making a new Bofors shell, told MI5 that he had been approached by a KGB officer and asked to provide a sample of the new shell. McCaul arranged for a dummy shell to be made up and filled with sand so that it felt as if it were full of explosive. As soon as the double agent handed over the shell in a South London park, McCaul pounced from the bushes. He told the Russian that he was in serious trouble, and flagrantly in possession of a piece of Top Secret British military equipment. He would certainly be declared PERSONA NON GRATA. KGB officers feared expulsion. For one thing they lost the perks of overseas service, but more important, it represented a failure, and any failure automatically made them suspect in the eyes of their own counterintelligence officers. The KGB man began to shake uncontrollably, as McCaul conjured up visions of a burly London policeman carting the hapless Russian off to some secret dungeon for a spot of torture.
"Don't shake the shell, for Christ's sake," he shouted, "you'll trigger the fuse!"
The Russian dropped the shell to the ground and sprinted out of the park as if pursued by the furies. The next day he was on the plane home.
In fact, the Foreign Office was notoriously reluctant to give support. Numerous times we sent forward recommendations to expel Russians we caught recruiting or running agents, but the Foreign Office Northern Department, responsible for Anglo-Soviet relations, more often than not vetoed our case. Occasionally I attended these Northern Department meetings to give technical briefings on what the particular Russian diplomat had been doing. They always followed a set pattern. The MI6 contingent would object to expulsion, fearing a reprisal in Moscow. Then the Foreign Office would weigh in with a sermon about the importance of not disrupting pending arms control negotiations, or jeopardizing an imminent trade deal. Courtney Young turned to me on one occasion as we emerged from the ornate committee room and muttered:
"I've never seen such a hotbed of cold feet!"
The lack of Foreign Office support meant we had to rely on less orthodox methods of warning off the Soviets. Around this time we received a spate of reports from Watchers detailing approaches to them by Russians. One Watcher described how a KGB officer came up to him in a pub and handed him an envelope containing a large quantity of money, and tried to talk him into providing information about his MI5 work.
Michael McCaul decided that direct action was needed. He telephoned the Chief KGB Resident in his office in the Soviet Embassy, and asked for an appointment, using his cover name Macauley, which was well known to the Russians. He strode into the Embassy as bold as brass, and warned the Russians against any further approaches to the Watchers, making dire threats of diplomatic interventions which, in reality, were unlikely ever to have been sanctioned. McCaul was highly amused by his trip into the lion's den. The Resident made him lavishly welcome and they took afternoon tea together under a giant aspidistra. The Russian doubted that any of his staff could be so indelicate as to engage in espionage on foreign soil, but agreed to look into the matter in case one of the staff had, perhaps, been a little overzealous.
"Perhaps the British Security authorities have made a mistake," he suggested. "The business has become so crowded these days. So many countries, so many embassies, so many diplomats. Sometimes it is difficult to be sure who is working for whom..."
There were no more approaches to the Watchers.
In the summer of 1959, just as things began to improve in D Branch, the Tisler case came alive again, clouding our minds with doubt and confusion. It began when the young male nurse, whose recruitment led to the chase for the GRUFF signal in Clapham, was suddenly reactivated. His Russian controller handed him a suitcase, and asked him to store it at home. Inside the suitcase was an old World War II radio set, which made us immediately suspect the whole thing was another game designed to lure us out of London. But we had no definite proof that the Russians knew we had turned the nurse, so we decided to follow it up. D1 placed continuous Watcher coverage on the nurse's house in the Midlands, and all Watcher activity closed down in London. I arranged for Watcher headquarters to continue to transmit notification of Russians and Czechoslovakians leaving Kensington Park Gardens, so they would think we were still following them.