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NATO Blinded By Cold War Traitor
THE true scale of the damage wreaked on the UK and Nato by a notorious cold war traitor has been disclosed for the first time.Geoffrey Prime, a former GCHQ spy, sold secrets to the KGB revealing that Britain and America had cracked high-grade Soviet military codes, according to a new book. At a meeting with his handlers in Vienna, Prime, who is now 71, passed on 15 rolls of film containing 500 pages of classified documents taken by a miniature camera. The revelation led to Moscow changing its encryption methods, leaving western intelligence in the dark for almost a decade afterwards. At one point, London and Washington were so wrong-footed that they mistakenly feared Russia was about to invade Poland. Prime's treachery only came to light in 1982 after he was arrested for sex attacks on young girls. His wife Rhona found evidence of his spying and reported it to police. At his Old Bailey trial, the prosecution said Prime had caused "exceptionally grave damage to the interests and security of this country and its allies". However, the exact details of what he had leaked to the KGB over a 14-year period -- in return for just £8,000 -- remained unclear. Now, a new book, The Secret Sentry by Matthew Aid, to be published next week, reveals that the information handed over by Prime -- whose code-name was Rowlands -- told the Russians their codes had been broken. GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, and America's National Security Agency (NSA), cracked the Russian ciphers in 1976 after 27 years of failed attempts. The wealth of secret data that Prime subsequently gave to his KGB handlers made it clear to them their codes had been breached. Among the classified material passed on by Prime were documents giving the Soviet Union the first hint that western intelligence agencies had developed surveillance technology of such sophistication that they had begun using satellites to monitor Kremlin phone calls. The Russians changed all their ciphers, making them impossible to read until the end of the cold war in 1989. "The codebreakers' advances were destroyed by Prime," said Aid. "NSA and GCHQ lost their ability to read important Soviet systems when the Russians abruptly and without warning changed their codes." It meant the West was left critically blind to Moscow's intentions during the 1980-1 Solidarity crisis in Poland. With Warsaw Pact troops mounting exercises on Poland's borders, US officials feared Russia was on the brink of invading to put down a wave of unrest caused by the Polish authorities' reaction to strikes led by Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement. Only later did it emerge that Moscow was just using the threat of force to ensure Polish communists remained in power. The Secret Sentry, a history of the NSA, reveals that British codebreakers who worked at Bletchley Park during the second world war made the first inroads into Soviet high-grade ciphers in early 1946. However, three years later, a US army intelligence operator called William Weisband told the Russians their codes had been broken. It meant Britain and America were unable to foresee the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslova-kia in 1956 and 1968. Prime first started working in signals intelligence as an RAF linguist and was based in Berlin when he decided to contact the KGB in 1968. Having lost his parents and his religious faith, and having failed to achieve promotion in the RAF, Prime later told police: "I suppose I wanted something to believe in." After slipping a note to a Soviet army officer, a rendezvous was arranged at a West Berlin restaurant. The KGB gave Prime a crash course in encryption and taught him how to use a Minox mini-cam-era to photograph documents. His handlers, Igor and Valya, encouraged him to join GCHQ, initially as a linguist in London, and then, from March 1976, at the Cheltenham headquarters where he had access to top secret documents. He would usually pass on information in dead-letter boxes. Prime quit GCHQ in September 1977, unable to cope with his double life. He became a minicab driver, but remained in contact with the Russians and at a meeting in Vienna in May 1980 handed over 500 pages of classified material. It was these documents that convinced the Russians their codes had been broken. A second meeting in East Germany at which Prime was debriefed by Soviet cipher experts, confirmed their fears and the codes were changed. Prime was only unmasked because he was a member of a paedophile ring and was arrested for indecent assaults on girls as young as 11. While he was in custody, Rhona, who was his second wife, discovered his one-time code pads in his wallet and alerted police. Prime was sentenced to 35 years for spying and a further three years for three indecent assaults. He was released on licence in 2001 and given a new identity to protect him from vigilante attacks. Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-05-25 |
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