Philby's defection and the confessions of Blunt, Long, and Cairncross swept away many of these reservations, although the fear of Establishment scandal remained just as acute as ever. Hollis agreed to the drastic expansion of D3, and it was given a simple, yet massive task - to return to the 1930s, and search the files for clues which might lead us to spies still active today, to vet a generation, to clear up as many loose ends as possible, and to provide the Service with an accurate history for the first time. The guiding principle of my D3 section was a remark Guy Liddell made to me on one of his frequent visits back to the office after he retired.
"I bet 50 percent of the spies you catch over the next ten years have files or leads in the Registry which you could have followed up..."
I was sure he was right. I thought back to Houghton, and his wife's report on him, to Blake, and to Sniper's early lead to Blake, to Philby and to Blunt, where evidence existed but was never pursued relentlessly enough. Perhaps most amazing of all, I read the Klaus Fuchs file, and discovered that after he was caught MI5 found his name, his Communist background, and even his Party membership number, all contained in Gestapo records which MI5 confiscated at the end of the war. Somehow the information failed to reach the officers responsible for his vetting. But also in 1945-48 an officer, Michael Sorpell, had researched Fuchs and recorded on the file that Fuchs must be a spy.
There were several obvious places to look in the inert mass of papers lying in the Registry. First there were the Gestapo records. The Gestapo was an extremely efficient counterespionage service, and operated extensively against European Communist parties and the Soviet intelligence services. They had a trove of information about them, developed at a time when our knowledge of Europe was virtually nonexistent because of the conditions of war. They had invaluable intelligence on the most important of all European Soviet rings - the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra. This was a series of loosely linked self-sustaining illegal rings controlled by the GRU in German-occupied Europe. The Rote Kapelle was run with great bravery and skill, relaying by radio vital intelligence to Moscow about German military movements.
The most important of all the Gestapo records for the British were the Robinson papers. Henry Robinson was a leading member of the Rote Kapelle in Paris, and one of the Comintern's most trusted agents. In 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo and executed. Although he refused to talk before dying, papers were found under the floorboards of his house which revealed some of the Ring's activities. The handwritten notes listed forty or fifty names and addresses in Britain, indicating that Robinson had also been responsible for liaising with a Rote Kapell ring in Britain. After the war Evelyn McBarnet did a lot of work on the Robinson papers, but the names were all aliases, and many of the addresses were either post-boxes or else had been destroyed in the war. Another MI5 officer, Michael Hanley, did a huge research task in the 1950s, identifying and listing every known agent of the Rote Kapelle. There were more than five thousand names in all. But since then the trail had gone dead. Perhaps, I thought, there might be clues among all this material which might take us somewhere.
Another place to look was among the records of defector debriefings. Work was already in progress with the recent defectors like Golitsin and Goleniewski, but there were still many loose ends in the intelligence provided by prewar and wartime defectors. Walter Krivitsky, the senior NKVD officer who defected in 1937, told MI5, for instance, that there was a well-born spy who had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and joined the Foreign Office. For years everyone assumed this to be Donald Maclean, even though Maclean was educated at Gresham Holt's and Cambridge. He just did not fit, but rather than confront the problem, the allegation had been left to collect dust in the files.
Then there was Konstantin Volkov, a senior NKVD officer who approached the British Consulate in Istanbul and offered to reveal the names of Soviet spies in Britain in return for money. He gave an Embassy official a list of the departments where the spies allegedly worked. Unfortunately for Volkov, his list landed on Kim Philby's desk at MI6 headquarters. Philby was then head of MI6 Soviet Counterintelligence, and against the wishes of Director C he persuaded him to let him go to Turkey, ostensibly to arrange for Volkov's defection. He then delayed his arrival by two days. The would-be defector was never seen again, although the Turks thought that both Volkov and his wife had been flown out strapped to stretchers. One of Volkov's spies was thought to be Philby himself, but there were several others who had just never been cleared up - like the spy Volkov claimed was working for MI6 in Persia.
Lastly there was the VENONA material - by far the most reliable intelligence of all on past penetration of Western security. After Arthur left I took over the VENONA program, and commissioned yet another full-scale review of the material to see if new leads could be gathered. This was to lead to the first D3-generated case, ironically a French rather than a British one. The HASP GRU material, dating from 1940 and 1941, contained a lot of information about Soviet penetration of the various emigre and nationalist movements who made their headquarters in London during the first years of the war. The Russians, for instance, had a prime source in the heart of the Free Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service, which ran its own networks in German-occupied Eastern Europe via couriers. The Soviet source had the cryptonym Baron, and was probably the Czech politician Sedlecek, who later played a prominent role in the Lucy Ring in Switzerland.
The most serious penetration, so far as MI5 were concerned, was in the Free French Government led by Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle faced persistent plots in London masterminded by his two Communist deputies, Andre Labarthe, a former CHEF DU CABINET who was responsible for civilian affairs, and Admiral Mueselier, who controlled military affairs. MI5 kept a close eye on these plots during the war at Churchill's instigation, and Churchill ordered the arrest of both Labarthe and Mueselier when de Gaulle had gone to Dakar to free that territory for the Free French; but in 1964 we broke a decrypt which showed conclusively that Labarthe had been working as a Soviet spy during this period, moreover at a time when the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact was still in existence.
The U.S. VENONA also contained material about Soviet penetration of the Free French. The CIA had done no work on it, either because they thought it was too old or because they had no one with sufficient grasp of French history. When I studied it, I found that another senior French politician, Pierre Cot, the Air Minister in Daladier's prewar cabinet, was also an active Russian spy.