Use of part time spies by MI6

THE USE OF PART TIME SPIES BY MI6
By Richard Norton-Taylor
4 April 1991
The Guardian
If a spy's worst nightmare is to be unmasked, to be mistaken for one is the hazard which faces too many visiting academics, businessmen, journalists, and others with special access to circles of influence in countries potentially hostile to Britain.
"Unfortunately," said Roger Cooper, the British businessman, after he was released from an Iranian prison, "I fit the profile of a British spy." He had good Iranian contacts, he travelled to Iran a lot, and spoke Farsi.

The trouble is that the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, has indeed used businessmen and tried to use journalists as freelance contacts, or what it calls "approved unofficial agents".

Some are persuaded by the apparently exotic attractions of the secret world of espionage to try to do something satisfyingly patriotic. But this is a false picture of the seedy demi-monde of full-time and part-time spies, of ambiguous and misplaced loyalties where the unsuspecting and naive get lost in a wilderness of mirrors.

One view has it that the practice of governments asking their private citizens to gather information is understandable, and understood throughout the world: the unquenchable thirst for information and high-grade gossip is not unique to Whitehall.

But the practice whereby national intelligence services use freelance agents may be considered unacceptable, even fundamentally irresponsible. Although it is not unique to MI6, it does have one peculiar advantage: successive governments have maintained the fiction that it does not exist in peacetime; thus it cannot be held to account, and can deny everything.

In common with the intelligence agencies of most other countries, MI6 has an officer attached to most large embassies abroad. Despite the lengths to which embassies go to disguise their agents, most host countries know exactly who they are.

The Swiss, for example, are well aware that many of the "diplomats" accredited to the United Nations agencies in Geneva are more interested in winkling out secrets from each other, and perhaps trying to turn themselves into double agents, than in the well-being of the UN.

According to Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB double agent smuggled out of Moscow by MI6 in 1985, important information is gathered only by intelligence services; conventional diplomats, he suggests, are more or less a waste of time and money. MI6, he says, should come into the open and proudly publicise its successes.

MI6 is known to have placed agents in banks abroad, and in companies which have branches in locations where there is no official government presence. It persuaded the Observer newspaper to take on Kim Philby as its Beirut correspondent after his fellow Soviet agents, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to Moscow in 1951. Its use of outsiders is well known.

MI6 asked Greville Wynne, a businessman, to act as a freelance contact for Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) colonel who supplied Britain with Russian missile secrets. Wynne, who enjoyed the excitement, was arrested in 1962 and released two years later in exchange for Gordon Lonsdale, the KGB spy held in Britain.

James Rusbridger, an international commodity broker who had done Moscow a favour by disposing of unwanted Cuban sugar in the early 1960s and was thus persona grata in the Soviet Union, was asked by MI6 to take money into Russia, and bring documents out. He was told that if anything went wrong, he would be on his own.

Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, jailed for their part in a Dublin bank robbery, said at their trial that they were put up to it by British intelligence as part of an attempt to discredit the IRA. The then Home Secretary, Robert Carr, admitted that Kenneth Littlejohn had had dealings with British intelligence, but the Government denied that it had approved of any illegal acts, and it rejected an inquiry, citing "a long-established rule that we do not discuss the activities of the intelligence services in public".

Anthony Divall, a Hamburg-based businessman, was asked by MI6 during the Falklands war to pose as an arms dealer and to penetrate the Argentinian military procurement mission in Paris. Backed by a #16 million draft handled by the Whitehall branch of Williams and Glyn's bank, he fooled the Argentinians into believing he could provide 30 Exocet missiles, thereby discouraging them from going after genuine arms dealers.

When the war was over, Divall said he had been asked by MI6 to leak the successful Exocet scam to a "quality British newspaper". His relationship with MI6 ended after the agency persuaded the German police to drop arms-dealing charges against him and he had tried to sue the agency for #200,000 in expenses. In 1979 Bill Graham, a former military policemen, was asked by MI6 to apply for a double-glazing contract for the Soviet trade mission in Highgate, north London. He offered the Russians a deal, sub sidised by MI6, that they could not refuse and, while working on the windows, planted bugs, collected documents, and secretly photographed the building.