The second Naval spy, Serial 8, was a more senior figure, according to Golitsin. Golitsin claimed to have seen numbered copies of three NATO documents, two of which were classified Top Secret. He had seen them by accident while working on the NATO desk of the KGB Information Department, which prepared policy papers for the Politburo on NATO matters. Golitsin was in the middle of preparing a report on NATO naval strategy, when three documents came in from London. Normally all material reaching Golitsin was bowdlerized, in other words rewritten to disguise its source, but because of the urgency of his report, he was provided with the original document copies. The CIA tested Golitsin on his story. The three documents in question, detailing plans to expand the Clyde Polaris submarine base, and the reorganization of NATO naval dispositions in the Mediterranean, were shown to him, mixed up with a sheaf of other NATO documents. He immediately identified the correct three, and even explained that the Clyde document he saw had four sets of numbers and figures for its circulation list, whereas the copy we showed him had six sets. When the original circulation list was checked, it was found that such a copy had indeed existed but we were unable to find it. Patrick Stewart analyzed the circulation of the three documents, and a senior Naval Commander, now retired, appeared as the only credible candidate. The case was handed over to D1 (Investigations).
Within months of Golitsin's arrival, three further sources in the heart of the Soviet intelligence machine suddenly, and apparently independently, offered their services to the West. The first two, a KGB officer and a GRU officer, both working under cover in the Soviet delegation to the UN, approached the FBI and offered to act as agents in place. They were given the code names Fedora and Top Hat. The third walk-in occurred in Geneva in June 1962. A senior KGB officer, Yuri Nossenko, contacted the CIA and offered his services.
Nossenko soon gave a priceless lead in the hunt for the British Naval spies. He claimed that the Gribanov recruitment had been obtained through homosexual blackmail, and that the agent had provided the KGB with "all NATO" secrets from a "Lord of the Navy." The combination of NATO and the Gribanov recruitment led MI5 to combine the two serials 3 and 8. There was one obvious suspect, a clerk in Lord Carrington's office, John Vassall. Vassall had originally been placed at the top of Patrick Stewart's preliminary list of four Serial 3 suspects, but when the case was handed over to the investigating officer, Ronnie Symonds, Symonds had contested Stewart's assessment. He felt that Vassall's Catholicism and apparent high moral character made him a less serious suspect. He was placed at the bottom of the list instead. After attention focused on him strongly following Nossenko's lead, it was soon established that Vassall was a practicing homosexual, who was living way beyond his means in a luxury flat in Dolphin Square. MI5 faced the classic counterespionage problem. Unlike any other crime, espionage leaves no trace, and proof is virtually impossible unless a spy either confesses or is caught in the act. I was asked if there was any technical way we could prove Vassall was removing documents from the Admiralty. I had been experimenting for some time with Frank Morgan on a scheme to mark classified documents using minute quantities of radioactive material. The idea was to place a Geiger counter at the entrance of the building where the suspected spy was operating so that we could detect if any marked documents were being removed. We tried this with Vassall, but it was not a success. There were too many exits in the Admiralty for us to be sure we were covering the one which Vassall used, and the Geiger counter readings were often distorted by luminous wristwatches and the like. Eventually the scheme was scrapped when fears about the risks of exposing people to radiation were raised by the management.
I looked around for another way. It was obvious from the CIA tests that Golitsin had a near-photographic memory, so I decided to make another test, to see if he could remember any details about the type of photographic copy of the NATO documents he had seen. Through this it might be possible to deduce whether he was handing over originals for them to copy and return to him. I made twenty-five photographs of the first page of the Clyde Base NATO document, each one corresponding to a method we knew the Russians had in the past recommended to their agents, or which the Russians themselves used inside the Embassy, and sent them over to Golitsin via the CIA. As soon as Golitsin saw the photographs he picked out the one which had been taken with a Praktina, illuminated at each side by two anglepoise lamps. Armed with this knowledge, we arranged to burgle Vassall's flat when he was safely at work. Hidden in a drawer at the bottom of a bureau we found a Praktina document-copying camera, and a Minox as well. That evening he was arrested, permission for a search warrant having been obtained, and his apartment was stripped bare. In the base of a corner table a secret drawer was found which contained a number of exposed 35mm cassettes, which were developed to reveal 176 classified documents. Vassall swiftly confessed to having been homosexually compromised in Moscow in 1955, and was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
As the intelligence from the throng of new defectors was being pieced together in London and Washington, I faced a personal crisis of my own The Lonsdale case reawakened the whole issue of technical resources for MI5 and MI6. Although the AWRE program which I and Frank Morgan designed in 1958 had been an outstanding success, little else had changed. The attempt to satisfy Intelligence Service needs within the context of the overall defense budget had failed, especially in the advanced electronics field. We were moving rapidly into a new era of satellite and computer intelligence, and when the Radiations Operations Committee was split into Clan and Counterclan, it was obvious that the scale and range of their operations would require a far more intensive degree of technical and scientific research and development than had hitherto been possible. Everyone realized at last that the old ad hoc system which I had struggled to change since 1958 would have to be comprehensively reformed. Both MI5 and MI6 needed their own establishments, their own budgets, and their own staffs. Shortly after the Lonsdale case I approached Sir William Cook again with the approval of both Services, and asked him to make a thorough review of our requirements. We spent several days together visiting the various defense establishments which were currently servicing us, and he wrote a detailed report, one of the most important in postwar British Intelligence history.
The essence of Cook's report was that the Hanslope Communications Center, the wartime headquarters of the Radio Security Service, and since then the MI6 communications center for its overseas agent networks, should be radically expanded to become a research establishment servicing both MI5 and MI6, with special emphasis on the kinds of advanced electronics necessary in both the Clan and the Counterclan committees. Cook recommended that the new staff for Hanslope should be drawn from the Royal Naval Scientific Service. This was, to me, the most important reform of all since joining MI5. I had lobbied to remove the artificial barrier which separated the technical divisions of the Intelligence Services from the rest of the scientific Civil Service. This barrier was wholly damaging, it deprived the Intelligence Services of the best and the brightest young scientists, and on a personal level meant that I had to forfeit nearly twenty years of pension allocation earned in the Admiralty, in order to accept MI5's offer to work for them. I pressed Cook continually on this point during the time he was writing his report, and he recognized that my arguments were correct. As a result of his report fifty scientists were transferred to Hanslope, with their pensions intact, and with the option of transferring back if they so wished at a future date. Since I was the first scientist, I was not covered by these new arrangements, although I was not at the time unduly worried. I believed that when the time came the Service would, as they promised, make some recompense. Unfortunately, my trust was sadly misplaced.