"Just remember," roared Harvey, "you're a fuckin' beggar in this town."
I rolled with the punches. Yes, we had a poor record on counterespionage, but Arthur was back now, and Lonsdale was just the beginning. No, we had no obligation to tell you about RAFTER from the beginning. It was our secret to do with as we judged fit.
"I've come over here and just given you my life's work - ENGULF, STOCKADE, RAFTER - everything. You sat opposite me for five days at NSA and told me nothing. Where's the exchange in that? The truth is, you're just pissed off because we stole a march on you...!"
Harvey was all puffed out and purple like a turkeycock, sweat pouring off his temples, his jacket open to reveal a polished shoulder holster and pistol, his gross belly heaving with drink. It was now four o'clock in the morning. I had had enough for one night, and left. I told Angleton that the program for the next day was off. I took a poor view of what had happened. It was up to them to make the peace.
The next day Angleton called on me at my hotel, unannounced. He was charming, and full of apologies. He blamed the previous night's scene on Harvey.
"He drinks too much, and thinks you have to give a guy a hard time to get the truth. He believes you now. He sees you as a threat, that's all."
He invited me out for dinner. At first I was wary, but he said he understood my point of view, and hoped I understood his, and talked enthusiastically about his plans to help with resources. The tension soon disappeared. He offered to take me to see Louis Tordella to persuade him to help with the counterespionage side of ROC, and the following day sent a car to take me down to Fort Meade. Technically, I was not supposed to visit NSA without being accompanied by someone from GCHQ, so I was taken into the side entrance, and whisked up to Tordella's office on the top floor. We had lunch there, and I outlined the Lonsdale case for the third time.
At the end Tordella asked how he could help, and I explained that the main weakness was that despite the breakthrough offered by my classification of illegal broadcasts from Moscow, GCHQ had insufficient coverage of the traffic. There had been substantial improvements since Lonsdale, but we still had only between twelve and fifteen radio positions intercepting these signals, which meant we were really only sampling them. We needed at least 90 percent of the take to make real progress on the classifications. Tordella was much taken with the possibilities, and agreed to guarantee a worldwide take of 100 percent for at least two years. He was as good as his word, and soon the intelligence was flooding back to GCHQ, where it was processed by the section supporting the Counterclan Committee. A young GCHQ cryptanalyst named Peter Marychurch (now the Director of GCHQ) transformed my laborious handwritten classifications by processing the thousands of broadcasts on computer and applying "cluster analysis" to isolate similarities in the traffic, which made the classifications infinitely more precise. Within a few years this work had become one of the most important tools in Western counterespionage.
On the drive back to Washington I was elated. Not only had my visit to Washington secured American backing for the ENGULF side of ROC's work, but I had their commitment to run the counterespionage side as well. I had almost forgotten the run-in with Harvey until Angleton brought the subject up again.
"Harvey wants to see you again."
I expressed astonishment.
"No, no - he wants to ask your advice. He's got a problem in Cuba, and I told him you might be able to help."
"But what about the other night?" I asked.
"Oh, don't worry about that. He just wanted to know whether you could be trusted. You passed the test."
Angleton was typically elliptical, and refused to explain further, saying that he had arranged lunch with Harvey in two days' time, and I would find out more then.
The year 1961 was the height of the CIA's obsession with Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion had recently failed, and Angleton and I regularly discussed the subject, since I had been heavily involved in MI5's counterinsurgency campaign against the Greek Cypriot guerrilla leader, Colonel Grivas, in the 1950s. When I visited Washington in 1959, Richard Helms and Richard Bissel, in charge of operations in Southeast Asia, asked me to lecture on my experiences to a group of senior officers concerned with counterinsurgency. Even then it was obvious the CIA had plans in Cuba, where Fidel Castro was busy establishing a Communist state. Bissell subsequently took over the running of the Bay of Pigs operation, but when it failed it was common knowledge in Washington that his days were numbered, as the Kennedys purged all those responsible for the Cuban fiasco.
When I arrived at the restaurant two days later, Harvey stood up to greet me and gave me a firm handshake. He looked well scrubbed and less bloated than usual, and made no reference to the events of two nights before. He was a hard man, who gave and expected no quarter. He told me that he was studying the Cuban problem, and wanted to hear from me about the Cyprus campaign.
"I missed your briefing in 1959," he said, without a trace of irony.
I first became involved in Cyprus shortly after I joined MI5, when the Director of E Branch (Colonial Affairs), Bill Magan, sent me some papers on the escalating conflict. The Greek Cypriot Archbishop Makarios was leading a vigorous campaign for full independence, supported by the Greek Government, the AKEL Communist Party, and EOKA, the guerrilla army led by Colonel Grivas. Britain, anxious to retain Cyprus as a military base, was resisting, and by 1956 a full-scale military emergency was in force, with 40,000 British troops pinned down by a few hundred Grivas guerrillas.
British policy in Cyprus was an utter disaster. The Colonial Office was trying to pursue political negotiations in a deteriorating security situation, relying on the Army to keep order. Grivas needed to be located, isolated, and neutralized before political negotiations stood a chance, but although the Army launched massive searches, they failed to find him. I was convinced, studying the papers, that MI5 could do far better than the Army, and I told Magan I was confident that, given time, we could locate Grivas accurately by tracing his communications in the same way I planned our attacks against the Russians.
Magan immediately took me to see Sir Gerald Templer, who led the successful counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya, and was a great advocate of the use of intelligence to solve colonial problems. Templer was enthusiastic about my plan and agreed to lobby the Colonial Office on MI5's behalf. But the Colonial Office remained adamant; they wanted to pursue their own security policy, and had no wish to involve MI5. There was no great enthusiasm, either, inside MI5 for becoming embroiled in what was fast becoming an insoluble, situation. Hollis, in particular, was opposed to becoming involved in Colonial Affairs without a clear invitation from the Ministry. His attitude was that MI5 was a domestic organization, and while he would provide a Defense Liaison Officer to advise the Army, that was all.