At lunchtime on March 16, 1965, Chief Inspector Jock Wilson of London’s Special Branch followed his suspect through the streets surrounding London’s Charing Cross Underground station.
Under the railway arches nearby, he witnessed Peter Sydney Allen exchange envelopes with another man. It was time to move in.
He arrested Allen, a soldier and desk sergeant working at the Ministry of Defence who had been under surveillance for a month. His companion, Maj Abdul Hafidh Khazal Al Abbassi, an assistant military attaché of the Iraqi embassy, was also detained.
Maj Al Abbassi was taken to Canon Row Police Station, where he claimed diplomatic immunity. When his official car arrived a little over an hour later, he was allowed to leave.
Allen, however, was taken to New Scotland Yard and charged with selling state secrets to agents from Egypt and Iraq. Among the documents he handed over during a dozen meetings over the course of a month were Top Secret UK and US plans to help Lebanon in the event of an attack on the government. There were also files marked “Assistance for Kuwait”, “Family of Weapons” and an alphabetical list of file names Allen would be able to get his hands on from the cabinets he could access at the War Office. He was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The operation to arrest Allen, which was given the code word Gospel, has been revealed through the release of a trove of documents from the UK’s National Archives relating to the 1960s. Many cover the Cold War, including a succession of officers working for Russia, plus members of society with Communist affiliations. Labour politician and founder of the National Health Service, Aneurin Bevan, came to the notice of MI5 due to his association with the Communist Party in Russia and the UK and his unspoken criticism of the War Cabinet.
Mayfair surveillance
Mark Dunton, principal records specialist at the National Archives, told The National the Allen file revealed a remarkably casual attitude to security at the MoD, particularly given the fall-out from spy scandals within its ranks during that era. They appeared to rely on trust and vetting to ensure staff did not betray secrets, but were clearly not always successful.
The Allen file appears to suggest that the security services were monitoring the Egyptian embassy in South Street, Mayfair, when they became aware its diplomats were clandestinely meeting a British official – described as 5ft 10in with brown hair and blue eyes, often wearing a brown suit and sheepskin coat – and set about trailing him.
Allen had only just begun selling secrets. Astonishingly, his trail of deception had begun when he used a payphone in a corridor of the War Office to ring the Iraqi embassy to ask if they would be interested in meeting him. His reason for selling secrets was simple: he needed money.
His wife had been in hospital for a cancer operation, his four children had returned from his mother-in-law’s in Wales, and his bills had mounted up. In his statement he gave when he was questioned, he said: “I was desperate for money and the only way I could see of obtaining any was by use of the Top Secret documents.
“I thought about it for about a fortnight and then telephoned the Iraqi embassy. I used the public call box in the corridor at the War Office and got the military adviser's phone number from the directory. I didn't at that time know who I spoke to but I have since found out that he is Maj Abassi, the assistant military attaché. I told him I was in possession of something which I thought he would be interested in seeing.”
His first drop-off, for which he received £20, was made at the embassy in Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, and involved papers regarding Kuwait.
Payment for secrets
A scrap of paper from that first meeting, on which he had scribbled the name and phone number of a colonel who would decide how much he should be paid depending on the usefulness of the secret papers, was found on him when he was arrested. He told police that the colonel asked him if he could get more papers regarding Middle Eastern countries.
“A few days later I found a Top Secret paper, in one of the combination lockers, on the Lebanon, which I thought might be of interest to him,” he said.
His agreed drop-off was not at the embassy, but near Charing Cross. This time he was not paid, as he was told they were “of no value to them”. He was also told he should instead try agents at the embassy of Egypt, then known as the United Arab Republic.
“I kicked up a bit of a fuss about this so he said if I could bring them something of value, especially on Israel, then they would pay me,” he said.
Action plan
The Top Secret Lebanon papers are contained in the file, and cover the US and UK’s “joint theatre” plan for action if the Lebanese government requested military assistance to “meet aggression” and “maintain order”. The plan says that Syria and Israel would constitute “a potential external threat” but that it was considered “most unlikely” that either neighbour would carry out any “aggressive acts”.
Instead, Syria and Egypt were thought likely to aggravate any internal disorder with the use of propaganda and agents with the aim of aligning the Muslim population with Syria. “The greatest and most likely threat to Lebanese stability lies in the recurrence of internal religious strife,” it said.
The action plan involves air and naval surveillance before committing forces “by amphibious assault if necessary”. The 29-page plan says ships of the Mediterranean Fleet and RAF planes should be at seven days' notice, and an army company on 24 hours' notice. Forces would move from a base in Cyprus directly into Lebanon.
“Although it is visualised as a limited operation in support of a friendly government, organised military opposition may be encountered and forces should be constituted and prepared for entry against a measure of organised resistance,” it states. Securing the airfield, port and city of Beirut would be the priority.
Financial straits
Allen, who had served in Egypt in the 1950s, admitted he had a dozen meetings in total, several of them witnessed by MI5, at which he often received £15. He would meet his contact near Park Lane and they would walk around Curzon St in the heart of Mayfair, or near Charing Cross. He said he did not believe he was offering “anything of consequence”.
He was in charge of 11 clerks, but was the person responsible for custody and processing of all Top Secret documents which came into the office. The papers were kept in two cabinets, and he was the only person who knew the combination.
“I would never have handed any information to any Soviet bloc countries and I only did what I did because I was in serious financial trouble,” he said. “Any money I got I passed over to my wife for housekeeping. I have kept nothing for myself. At no stage have I told any of these people who I really am, where I worked or how they could contact me.”
Clobbered
The files also contain accounts of discussions by British authorities about what should be done with the agents Allen was meeting. It was decided it was not necessary to demand their removal, but in any case, they were spotted flying out of the UK from London after they had “become compromised”.
The Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, was said to be “impressed” when given an account of the case.
Chief Inspector Wilson was sent a letter thanking him for his work by Courtenay Young, a senior MI5 officer who was head of the security service’s Soviet counter-espionage section during the Cold War. “Thanks to efficient co-operation and mutual goodwill we managed to clobber Gospel from the start to finish within a month and a day,” he wrote.
Lax attitude
Mr Dunton has written a book, The MI5 Archive: Official Secrets, with his colleague Stephen Twigge, studying thousands of secret papers released decades after they were filed away. There remains a “massive interest in espionage and spycraft”, he said, with the files rich in detail about surveillance reports, transcripts of telephone calls, listening devices and intercepted letters.
Although MI5 does not fall under the usual rules for government records to be released after 30 years, it had chosen to release a plethora of files 50 years or more after the fact.
He said the Allen case had echoes of the Portland Spy Ring in its simplicity. Unlikely spies Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee, who worked at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, stole classified documents and passed them to a KGB handler before returning them.
Mr Dunton said that despite posters with the message “Keep Secrets Secret” being displayed around its offices, the MoD had relied on staff's civil service values to keep them honest. Only when they slipped up, and colleagues became suspicious, would they be caught.