Free Spycatcher by Peter Wright Page B

microphone provided the Transcription Department with a written brief detailing the sort of intelligence he thought might be obtained from the interception. The transcription staff then scanned the conversation for passages which corresponded to the brief. When I first joined, the taps were normally transferred onto acetate, rather than tape. The acetates were scanned by "dabbing" into the disc at various points to sample the conversation. If anything of relevance was found, the transcribers placed a chalk mark on the appropriate place and worked from the chalk marks. It was an inefficient and time-consuming operation but more efficient than standard tape-recording methods.

    Most of these transcribers had been recruited in Kell's day from the emigre communities who fled to Britain at the end of World War I. They had turned the seventh floor into a tiny piece of Tsarist Russia. Most of them were members of the old Russian aristocracy, White Russians who talked with certainty of returning to the lands which had been expropriated after the Revolution. To them the KGB was not the KGB, it was the old Bolshevik Cheka. Most were fiercely religious, and some even installed icons in their rooms. They were famed throughout the office for their tempers. They considered themselves artists and behaved like prima donnas. Hardened case officers seeking clarification of a transcription approached the seventh floor with trepidation in case their request caused offense. The difficult atmosphere was inevitable. For years these women had listened, day after day, hour after hour, to the indecipherable mutterings and labyrinthine conspiracies of Russian diplomats. Spending a lifetime looking for fragments of intelligence among the thousands of hours of worthless conversation (known in the trade as "cabbages and kings") would be enough to turn any mind.

    The first thing I did was to institute hearing tests on the women, many of whom were becoming too old for the job. I encouraged those with failing hearing to handle material with a high sound quality, such as the telephone intercepts. I gave the corrupted microphone transcription to younger officers, of whom undoubtedly the best was Anne Orr-Ewing, who later joined me as a junior officer in the Counterespionage Department. Microphone transcription is difficult because you usually have only one microphone source for a multichannel conversation. I decided to design a piece of equipment to ease this problem. I went out to an electronics exhibition at Olympia and bought a tape machine which provided two heads. The second head gave a constant number of milliseconds (or more) delay on the sound as it went through, making it much fuller-bodied. In effect it simulated stereo sound, and made even the worst tapes much easier to understand. I installed the equipment on the seventh floor, and it made me a friend for life in Mrs. Grist.

    It was my first small victory for science. But beneath the seventh floor the great MI5 antique showroom slumbered on, undisturbed.

    The Department which required most urgent attention, and yet resisted modernization with the greatest determination, was A4. Since the war the Watchers had been outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the increasing numbers of Soviet and Soviet satellite diplomats on the streets of London. My first priority was to make a full review of the way the Watchers operated.

    I made arrangements to visit one of the MI5 observation posts in an MI5 house opposite one of the main gates of the Russian Embassy in Kensington Park Gardens. The observation post was in an upstairs bedroom. Two Watchers sat on either side of the window. A camera and telephoto lens on a tripod stood permanently trained down onto the street below. Both men were in shirt-sleeves, binoculars hanging around their necks. They looked tired. It was the end of their shift; the ashtrays were full to overflowing, and the table standing between them was scattered with coffee cups.

    As each Russian