was forthcoming. Corless ignored the questions and got on with the business in hand.
‘Peter has come back to us’, he said. ‘We should rejoice.’
That was his way of closing the door on an unhappy episode that he wanted to forget. The only test, he said, was the quality of Peter’s intelligence. If the early reports were anything to go by, it was proving to be better than ever. We had an inside view of the rapid expansion of the Soviet sphere of interest as communism engulfed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia and Albania. It was a progress we could do nothing to halt.
Corless held centre stage once more, but there were assassins waiting in the wings, and Adrian Gardner was one of them. Corless had only to slip up once and his enemies on his own side wouldget him. He delighted in this new circumstance. That he was now a major player in departmental politics and a target of so much jealousy proved he had arrived where he wanted to be.
By his own terms, Corless had made it.
*
The Soviet Intelligence Group, or SOVINT, was an ad hoc collection of working committees made up of intelligence officers, civil servants, seconded military and academics (economists, historians, specialists in politics, Russian speakers) whose task was to interpret any information coming out of the Soviet Union. The aim was to build up a picture of what was going on in Russia by pulling together all the available evidence and submitting it to a critical and high-level analysis.
SOVINT’s findings were then passed to the appropriate authority in Whitehall (nuclear issues to the Ministry of Supply, politics to the Foreign Office and so on, with copies of every report to a special Committee of the Cabinet), in the belief that this continuous stream of information would assist the decision-making process in the difficult post-war years when no one was sure which way the Soviets would jump. In the eyes of its progenitors in the Cabinet Office, this loose association of experts was SOVINT’s strength. The ability to call in experts when they were needed while otherwise leaving them undisturbed was seen as a time-and money-saving device, and satisfactorily progressive.
‘A structure to fit these hard-pressed times,’ was Rupert Corless’s verdict.
Quite deliberately, and in our view, very properly, the Cabinet Office decreed that the precise nature of our work was to be kept secret. In any civil service, there is nothing like a hint of secrecy to arouse intense speculative interest, not to say suspicion, and SOVINT became the focus of wide attention within days of the creation of our strange, unshapely federation of talents, ‘our archipelago of specialists’ as Corless once described it to me.
Those of us who were seconded to SOVINT from the Intelligence Service (Corless, Colin Maitland, Adrian Gardner, Arthur Gurney and myself) found it difficult to adjust to the broadness of our role until the arrival of Peter information, when Corless successfully forced through his plan for the Peter Committee. Our definition was now much tighter: we were the guardians of this rare seam ofSoviet information, its richness and the accompanying secrecy being the cause of so much of the jealousy against Corless. In this role our group concentrated solely on Peter, its purpose being to decrypt and interpret Peter intelligence.
We were a small and disparate group, some long-standing players in the intelligence game (Maitland, Gardner, Gurney all ex-SOE and SIS), others like myself with only our wartime experience. We had what Adrian Gardner always described as our two minders, Guy Benton from the Foreign Office (‘too effete to sit with foot soldiers like us,’ Adrian Gardner used to say) and Gordon Boys-Allen, a serving naval officer now seconded to the Ministry of Defence, whom even the gentle Arthur Gurney dismissed as ‘nice but dreadfully dim’.
An unlikely collection with an unusual purpose, yet under Rupert
‘Peter has come back to us’, he said. ‘We should rejoice.’
That was his way of closing the door on an unhappy episode that he wanted to forget. The only test, he said, was the quality of Peter’s intelligence. If the early reports were anything to go by, it was proving to be better than ever. We had an inside view of the rapid expansion of the Soviet sphere of interest as communism engulfed Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Yugoslavia and Albania. It was a progress we could do nothing to halt.
Corless held centre stage once more, but there were assassins waiting in the wings, and Adrian Gardner was one of them. Corless had only to slip up once and his enemies on his own side wouldget him. He delighted in this new circumstance. That he was now a major player in departmental politics and a target of so much jealousy proved he had arrived where he wanted to be.
By his own terms, Corless had made it.
*
The Soviet Intelligence Group, or SOVINT, was an ad hoc collection of working committees made up of intelligence officers, civil servants, seconded military and academics (economists, historians, specialists in politics, Russian speakers) whose task was to interpret any information coming out of the Soviet Union. The aim was to build up a picture of what was going on in Russia by pulling together all the available evidence and submitting it to a critical and high-level analysis.
SOVINT’s findings were then passed to the appropriate authority in Whitehall (nuclear issues to the Ministry of Supply, politics to the Foreign Office and so on, with copies of every report to a special Committee of the Cabinet), in the belief that this continuous stream of information would assist the decision-making process in the difficult post-war years when no one was sure which way the Soviets would jump. In the eyes of its progenitors in the Cabinet Office, this loose association of experts was SOVINT’s strength. The ability to call in experts when they were needed while otherwise leaving them undisturbed was seen as a time-and money-saving device, and satisfactorily progressive.
‘A structure to fit these hard-pressed times,’ was Rupert Corless’s verdict.
Quite deliberately, and in our view, very properly, the Cabinet Office decreed that the precise nature of our work was to be kept secret. In any civil service, there is nothing like a hint of secrecy to arouse intense speculative interest, not to say suspicion, and SOVINT became the focus of wide attention within days of the creation of our strange, unshapely federation of talents, ‘our archipelago of specialists’ as Corless once described it to me.
Those of us who were seconded to SOVINT from the Intelligence Service (Corless, Colin Maitland, Adrian Gardner, Arthur Gurney and myself) found it difficult to adjust to the broadness of our role until the arrival of Peter information, when Corless successfully forced through his plan for the Peter Committee. Our definition was now much tighter: we were the guardians of this rare seam ofSoviet information, its richness and the accompanying secrecy being the cause of so much of the jealousy against Corless. In this role our group concentrated solely on Peter, its purpose being to decrypt and interpret Peter intelligence.
We were a small and disparate group, some long-standing players in the intelligence game (Maitland, Gardner, Gurney all ex-SOE and SIS), others like myself with only our wartime experience. We had what Adrian Gardner always described as our two minders, Guy Benton from the Foreign Office (‘too effete to sit with foot soldiers like us,’ Adrian Gardner used to say) and Gordon Boys-Allen, a serving naval officer now seconded to the Ministry of Defence, whom even the gentle Arthur Gurney dismissed as ‘nice but dreadfully dim’.
An unlikely collection with an unusual purpose, yet under Rupert
Similar Books
