he used in letters home to his wife, which gave the identities of some of the men held with him. US Naval Intelligence originally handled communications with Stockdale, using a letter from his wife to secretly send him invisible carbon paper — although they warned him that if he was caught, he would be treated as a spy.
Stockdale was able to send back lists of potential targets, prisoners held and information on the camp’s location, but when senior officers decided to back off from the project, noting that the POWs ‘have got it tough enough right now… The last thing we need to do is make them spies’, the Navy turned to the CIA. The Technical Service Department’s Bruce Rounds came up with a new code which Stockdale’s wife used for a letter in May 1967.
Although the communications would lead to Stockdale’s brutal torture, they continued with other POWs, allowing families to find out about the fate of their loved ones. TSD agent Brian Lipton worked at night on the project which was kept secret from all but a very few at the CIA: it remained a classified secret even after the Vietnam War ended, with Lipton persuading now Rear Admiral Stockdale not to give up all the secrets in his autobiography. It was eventually revealed in a history of the Technical Services Division published in 2008, three years after Stockdale’s death.
The other key element of the CIA’s involvement in south-east Asia was Air America, the civilian airline owned by the Agency. This carried out multiple operations supporting the tribal groups, known as the Montagnards, who lived in the highlands between Vietnam and Laos, as well as mounting missions to rescue US pilots who had been shot down in North Vietnam. Between 1962 and 1975 Air America provided support to the Royal Lao Army and was used to transport anything and everything that needed to move around the area — from live pigs and cows during a famine, to Richard Nixon himself. According to some of its pilots, it was also involved in the opium trade (an accusation that gained credence with the release of a movie in 1990); it certainly was aware of the drugs trade, but its role was assisting in fighting the war against the communists, not policing narcotics.
Air America’s own history points out that its crews were involved in many different varieties of mission:
[They] transported tens of thousands of troops and refugees, flew emergency medevac missions and rescued downed airmen throughout Laos, inserted and extracted road-watch teams, flew night-time airdrop missions over the Ho Chi Minh trail, monitored sensors along infiltration routes, conducted a highly successful photo reconnaissance program, and engaged in numerous clandestine missions using night-vision glasses and state-of-the-art electronic equipment.
As the tide of the war in Laos turned against the Americans, Air America took heavy casualties. CIA Director Richard Helms decided to shut the operation down in 1972 once the war was concluded, but the final two years of service saw twenty-three Air America personnel killed. Although the operation’s reputation has been attacked, it is still regarded by the CIA as one of its finest. A plaque to those who served was unveiled at CIA Headquarters at Langley in 1988: ‘The aircrew, maintenance, and other professional aviation skills they applied on our behalf were extraordinary. But, above all, they brought a dedication to our mission and the highest standards of personal courage in the conduct of that mission.’
8
DISHONOUR
The seventies were a time of disillusionment in the Western world. In Britain, Edward Heath’s administration struggled with industrial disputes, and his successor Harold Wilson believed that MI5 were organizing a coup against him. In America, the ignominious end of the Vietnam War came as a shock to the country’s sense of self- belief. Matters were made worse when President Richard Nixon assisted in the cover-up of a break-in at the Watergate building in Washington DC, and would have to resign two years into his second term of office rather than risk being impeached. Worries about the CIA’s links to that burglary, as well as revelations about operations apparently directed against the American people, prompted investigations into the agency’s conduct, and a great deal of dirty linen being washed in public. West Germany’s chancellor was forced to resign when his closest advisor was revealed as a Stasi spy. And at the end of the decade, the Soviet Army, assisted by the KGB, invaded Afghanistan.
Not everything was doom and gloom. The decade began with a notable coup for MI5, who were able to arrange the expulsion of a ring of Soviet agents from the UK in Operation Foot, causing a major setback to Moscow Centre’s plans, not just in Great Britain but throughout the non-Communist world. In all, 105 agents were removed, which resulted in Soviet intelligence operations being severely hampered in the UK for the rest of the seventies.
Operation Foot came about because of increasing concern on the part of MI5 through the sixties at the size of the Soviet intelligence set-up in the UK — even if some in government and the civil service seemed to think that the threat from the KGB was diminishing following the Cuban Missile Crisis. In November 1968, following pressure from MI5, the government restricted the size of the Soviet embassy, but the KGB and GRU simply added intelligence officers to the Trade Delegation. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, appointed Foreign Secretary in Ted Heath’s cabinet following the June 1970 general election, raised the issue with his counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, only to be told: ‘These figures you give cannot be true because the Soviet Union has no spies.’
After some persuasion, the new Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, wrote a joint memo with Douglas- Home on 30 July 1971 to the prime minister, warning that there were at least 120 Soviet intelligence officers (from the KGB or GRU) in the UK, and that they were causing serious problems. ‘If the cases of which we have knowledge are typical, the total damage done by these Soviet intelligence gatherers must be considerable,’ they wrote. ‘Known targets during the last few years have included the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence; and on the commercial side, the Concorde, the Bristol ‘‘Olympus 593’’ aero-engine, nuclear energy projects and computer electronics.’ On 4 August, Douglas-Home sent a final warning to Gromyko about ‘inadmissible Soviet activities’.
Operation Foot would have taken place in October had it not been for the defection of KGB officer Oleg Lyalin on 3 September. Lyalin had been providing information to MI5 since the previous April, revealing his role as the senior representative of Department V, the KGB’s sabotage and covert affairs section. According to the plans Lyalin was compiling, seaborne sabotage groups would land at Hayburn Wyke on the north Yorkshire coast (240 miles north of London) with airborne colleagues dropping in north of the Caledonian Canal to cause major problems for the British infrastructure. In addition, he had been the case officer for Sirioj Husein Abdoolcader, the KGB spy in the GLC motor licensing department; Abdoolcader was arrested two weeks after Lyalin’s defection.
On 24 September, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Denis Greenhill, told the Soviet charge d’affairs that ninety GRU or KGB officers were being expelled, and fifteen others who were in the Soviet Union at the time had their visas revoked. The following day Douglas-Home faced an angry Gromyko at the UN, who warned it was dangerous for Britain to threaten the USSR. Douglas-Home apparently burst out laughing and said, ‘Do you really think that Britain can ‘‘threaten’’ your country? I am flattered to think that this is the case.’ Gromyko complained about the ‘hooligan-like acts of the British police’ and expelled eighteen British diplomats, but the matter didn’t escalate. The success of Operation Foot led to MI5’s standing within the international intelligence community rising.
KGB operations were hampered but not stopped altogether — in fact their key operative in the UK wasn’t affected by Operation Foot at all, since he was controlled from abroad. This was Geoffrey Prime, whose work at the British SIGINT headquarters at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) building in Cheltenham and elsewhere could have been much more damaging to British interests than it was, MI5 believed, had he been run by the KGB First Directorate, who handled most espionage operations. The Third Directorate, to whom Prime reported, weren’t used to handling such sensitive material. Even so, during his time at Cheltenham, the Russians suddenly changed their communications procedures, making them impenetrable to NSA and GCHQ analysts.
Prime had offered his services to the Russians while stationed with the RAF in West Berlin in 1968 — leaving a message at a Soviet checkpoint, asking Soviet intelligence to contact him — and was encouraged by them to
