Down Among the Spymen

...They would accept donations...

...Having lavished this money on MI5's pullulating panjandrums, the Home Office must find work for them...

...Oleg Gordievsky, another ex-KGB author, alleges in his book that the "fifth man" in the Blunt-Philby clique was a former British official named John Cairncross, who now lives in the south of France...

...Ex-Colonel Oleg Nech-iporenko is writing memoirs that will include an account of his meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico in 1963...

...Its clanky elevators, meandering corridors and creaky floorboards were straight out of the gospels of Saints Graham, Len and John...

...Recently I learned that Lyubimov shares this view...

...Nevertheless, the Home Office has let itself be blarneyed into spending nearly $200 million on a new MI5 base to ac-commodate2,200 security officers, near Vauxhall Bridge, in central London...

...The Angleton Angle How seriously this new wave in East European literature should be taken, I can't judge...

...People are actually paying to get into its intimidating HQ in ex-Dzerzhinsky Square...

...KGB training centers and museums could likewise earn money...

...He is said by Mangold to have inspired the campaign in MI5 to smear Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson as pro-Soviet...

...I can think of no other country in which so detailed an inquiry would have been possible...

...Their chiefs resisted...

...Was he consciously working for Moscow...

...It is probable that during their long boozy lunches Philby "picked him clean on CIA gossip and, more importantly, personality assessments," in the words of Leonard McCoy, a deputy head of CIA Counterintelligence...

...Well, maybe they were real charities...

...One day a humorist from the CIA (they do exist) asked whether Arab or Irish terrorists had ever tried to use the high-octane potential SIS was providing, and the building's most memorable feature was hurriedly excised...

...A green shirt is similarly taboo: It used to arouse suspicions of homosexuality or, worse, Irishness, and is now considered "econutty...

...With men like Philby and Blunt at their beck and call, the Soviets were well briefed on English social niceties...

...Yuri Modin, a KGB kingpin in England in the 1940s, has written a book about his association with the famous Cambridge traitors Sir Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean...

...And," he added softly, as if still in shock, "recycled Trots, and characters who called their lunch their dinner...

...Perhaps that consoled some of his victims...

...I just asked them about restaurants: 'What about the Ecu de France?' 'The what?' they replied...

...A year ago, in a novel I was writing, I put a comment about UK secret services into the mouth of a prince who is generally considered the bright member of the royal problem family...

...Unfit to be entrusted with a popcorn concession, Angleton was appointed head of the CIA Counterintelligence Service, a post he held from 1954 to 1974...

...that is done by the secretive Special Branch of the police...

...In normal times, a young graduate being interviewed for a post in the Foreign Office, the Treasury or SIS is expected to speak good English (a requirement that eliminates 80 per cent of the British population), to be at ease with a French menu, and to prefer rugby to soccer...

...Despite occasional scandals in county detective units, the police have a much better public image than MI5, considered by most Brits a sleazy extravagance...

...When Angle-ton passed him on to London, they too showed him their files and paid him a royal stipend and he did less work for it than the average royal...

...The KGB's decision to withdraw from the UK, leaving only a skeleton staff engaged in industrial espionage, has alarmed many MI5 employees: Spooks fear unemployment like everyone else...

...One spy book I do recommend is Cold Warrior...

...He may bear false witness and covet his neighbor's house, wife and ox, even his ass, but he must never wear brown shoes or a brown suit in town...

...Not only did he weaken Counterintelligence, he paralyzed it...

...It was written by an outstanding British journalist, Tom Mangold, assisted by a laser-eyed American researcher, Jeff Goldberg, and published last summer (Simon and Schuster, 462 pp., $24.95...

...Yves Rocard, a scientist who supplied London with reports on science-based Nazi secret weapons and projects, is described by his wartime British colleagues as "brave, very gallant and loyal, as staunch a friend as Britain could ever find...

...Similar reasoning led the French security service DST to establish its Toulouse offices over a public garage...

...Not that Labor ever proposed opening up Whitehall to the unwashed masses: Eton, Harrow, Winchester, and Oxbridge continued to rule Britannia...

...Studies of British and French intelligence organizations and their scandals have been compiled, yet never with the freedom and cooperation Mangold and Goldberg enjoyed...

...MI5's buildings are no more distinguished, though some tourists might relish the tea-and-cynicism ambience of its old Curzon Street quarters...

...The idea was to persuade the public that this was merely another commercial building...

...In Moscow, meanwhile, the KGB is becoming a tourist attraction...

...Yet fans of English spy fiction the world over would flock to London, waving their dollars, francs and yen, if the SIS and MI5 announced conducted tours of their holy sites...

...Cairncross, too, is said to have thought of bursting into print???until dissuaded by Britain's quirky libel laws...

...Perhaps the proximity of their new bases will make unification easier if a future prime minister decides to cut spending on spookery...

...Not from Oxford or Cambridge but from provincial universities...

...The CIA appears to think not...

...And there is talk in some former Soviet states of letting Western researchers, journalists and others consult KGB archives, for a fee...

...I've heard there is a certain amount of whitewashing and even disinformation in it...

...He violated the CIA's charter by organizing spying on American citizens...

...But he was for some years a friend of Philby, a fellow heavy drinker, though shrewder and more intelligent...

...Before long, MI5's Angletonian antics provoked demands for effective government control of the service, and it conceded a few points...

...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Down Among the Spymen It would seem that the senior spies and security chiefs of the Soviet Empire did not really enjoy "intelligence" work: They were essentially frustrated literary men...

...The offices adjoining the pub housed charities that...

...P.S...

...The police, of course, do not hesitate to remind their press contacts that in 40 years of Cold War MI5 failed to smoke out a single spy who had not already been fingered by a Soviet defector or the CIA...

...However, for a mishmash of social and political reasons, the Foreign Office, Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and Security Service (MI5) did briefly find themselves recruiting more graduates than usual from provincial "redbrick" universities???even Guardian readers," I was told by a friend who used to interview candidates in a house right down the Mall from Buckingham Palace...

...I was a spy with a heart...

...It was very easy to check them...

...She is Stella Rimington, a bright-eyed dark lady who would probably shred any sonnets addressed to her...

...The same year, in London, a Soviet attache, Yevgeniy Ivanov, was sharing a prostitute with the Secretary for War in the Conservative government headed by Harold Macmillan, who was himself sharing an earl's daughter with a Tory member of Parliament...

...One of the few non-British visitors for whom the front door of Broadway Buildings was always open was Professor Yves Rocard of the Sorbonne, father of Michel Rocard, recently Prime Minister of France...

...Broadway" actually had a sort of secret passage to a house in Queen Anne's Gate, the street behind it, and a claustrophobic pub next door that was usually out of bounds because it was assumed to be infested with Soviet death-watch beetles...

...But the Guide Michelin would probably award a mention to SIS's interesting London station, a star to Scotland Yard's secret museum, and two stars ("worth a detour") to Broadway Buildings, the shabby old edifice SIS veterans considered their basilica...

...Blurbed as a study of "the CIA's master spy hunter," James Jesus Angleton, it is also a deep probe of the CIA and an essential read for the CIA's paymaster, the American taxpayer...

...whose long flirtation with Chicago monetarism helped plunge the UK into its worst slump since 1930???failed to impose market discipline on the notoriously unprofitable secret services...

...Having fallen under the influence of one defector from the Soviet bloc, Anatoly Golitsyn, he rejected about 20 others and treated some of them vindictively...

...A prostitute being a less socially correct bedmate than an earl's daughter, the Secretary for War was disgraced, whereas Macmillan and the MP were promoted to the aristocracy...

...I haven't been in that part of London lately...

...Vanity of vanities...

...Rimington hopes to redeploy her officials by obtaining a more active role for them in keeping tabs on Irish and Scottish nationalists and other tetchy folk...

...the area...

...They were second-rate," he says (according to Auberon Waugh in the London Daily Telegraph...

...I find it interesting that a senior Soviet agent, nominally a Communist, should use the same kind of social litmus paper as upper-class Englishmen...

...Even Thatcher...

...Marcus Wolf, for example, head of the East German secret police for 30 years, is now eagerly churning out the second volume of his memoirs...

...Senior police officers have revealed that the director-general would like to take over a substantial slice of organized crime and narcotics, but they don't want to lose their monopoly...

...Meanwhile Mikhail Lyubimov, perhaps the KGB's top man in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, is entertaining London literary and political society with his reminiscences and opinions...

...Some senior British security officers were almost as irresponsible as Angle-ton in handling Golitsyn...

...But few of them can have guessed that one of his dearest ambitions was (he says) to meet John Le Carre...

...It became dusty and grubby, and there have been rumors of some consortium or other wanting to "develop"???meaning, probably, "devastate...

...The Home Office, nominally in charge of both organizations, is embarrassed...

...Similar considerations appear to have condemned yet another book on Philby & Co., The Hidden Years by Morris Riley, an English amateur spy-hunter, to remain locked in its publisher's warehouse...

...MI5 has huge computer files on British subjects but doesn't scoop up the dirt itself...

...Cold Warrior narrates the Angleton tragedy soberly and is, in the end, a compliment to the United States, a testimonial to the openness of American democracy...

...British Conservatives consider the 1960s and '70s (when the Labor Party was in office for 11 years) a period of social backsliding...

...Step Right Up...

...In short, the conventions of a decent English upbringing must be observed...

...The SIS's main building, Century House, used to have an amusing eccentricity: a public gasoline station on its ground floor, by the main entrance...

...Century House is now an ordinary commercial building with aloof views of affluence and poverty...

...Ivanov is now publishing his story under the title The Naked Spy...

...Ex-KGB-man Oleg Tsarev, who claims he had access to "thousands" of secret files, has announced his intention of enlightening the West with an account of Soviet spyworks...

...In this sphere the new Russia has been more enterprising than the West...

...The evidence Mangold and Goldberg have gathered suggests, and generally establishes, that Angleton was an alcoholic and a liar, and in varying degrees arbitrary, gullible, incompetent, irrational, irresponsible, mythomaniacal, and paranoid...

...Incidentally, across the river from the new MI5 building a still more expensive SIS office block is taking shape...

...He died in early April...

...Recently, for the first time in its 80-year history, MI5 announced the name of its new director-general...

...The two projects were approved by Margaret Thatcher, who at one time favored merging the secret services...

...The prince said: "I've heard that too many secret service recruits tend to be second-rate, often sycophantic: graduates whose degrees weren't good enough for the Foreign Office or Treasury...

...There was never any blood on my hands," he insists...