LAXITY CITED AT BRITISH SPY AGENCY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000505220001-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 26, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 2, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/26: CIA-RDP90-00
A?'r1~LE APPEAREQ
Laxity Cited
At British.
Spy Agency
Secrets Act Invoked
To Seize Manuscript
By Patrick E. Tyler
Washington Port Staff Writer
A former employe of Britain's top
secret communications spy agency
has alleged in an unpublished manu-
script that lax security was so per-
aa4e during his 30 years there
that. both U.S. and British intelli-
gence secrets routinely were lost,
misplaced or fell into Soviet hands.
The employe, Jock Kane, 61, re-
tired from the Government Com-
munications Headquarters, or
GCHQ, in 1978 after holding over-
seas posts supervising some of Brit-
ain's electronic eavesdropping ac-
tivities in places such as Aden (now
South Yemen) and Hong Kong,
where Britain has maintained a
600-person base to listen in on
Chinese military communications
and missile and nuclear weapons
tests. He also held supervisory
posts at GCHQ's main facility at
Cheltenham, England.
Kane's manuscript has been sup-
pressed under Britain's Official Se-
crets Act. A copy has been obtained
by The Washington Post.
Copies of the manuscript were
seized last year from a British pub-
lishing house and from three British
newspapers that were considering
serializing its contents In an unusu-
al twist, Special Branch agents of
Scotland Yard traveled to New
York to retrieve an errant copy that
had been submitted to a New York
publishing house.
Many of Kane's criticisms involve
mostly routine security matters,
such as photocopying restrictions in
top-secret areas and inventory con-
trol over U.S. and British military
code books and encryption equip.
ment. But Kane's principal allega-
tion is that widespread negligence
in GCHQ created conditions in
which confessed Soviet spy Geof-
WASHINGTON POST
2 November 1985
fret' A. Prime, with little difficulty,
spirited out thousands of pages of
top-secret GCHQ material relating
to the most sensitive spy satellite
projects undertaken by the United
States and Britain during the,
1970s.
Prime, a GCHQ Russian linguist,
confessed his espionage activity
after he was arrested in July 1982
for child molestation after leaving
the agency. He was convicted in
November 1982 and sentenced to
35 years in prison. U.S. intelligence
officials have said Prime did serious
damage to the security of the U.S.
spy satellite program.
Some of Kane's allegations have
been aired in British television doc-
umentaries, and others have been
published in the United States. Still,
when Kane completed the manu-
script for publication in book form,
the government took formal action
to stop it.
The reason, said Henry Steel,
legal secretary to Britain's attorney
general, in a telephone interview
last week, was, "This is an account
given by him of information that by
its nature is confidential and rep-
resents a breach of his duty of con-
fidence to the crown."
But Kane and his supporters have
questioned the government's harsh
reaction. "I think the British gov-
ernment is probably suppressing
the book more out of embarrass-
ment than security concerns," said
James Bamford, American author of
"The Puzzle Palace," a history of
the U.S. National Security Agency
(NSA).
GCHQ is the British equivalent of
NSA, whose job is to monitor and
intercept radio, telephone and cable
traffic overseas, culling useful in-
telligence for western military and
political leaders. GCHQ, like NSA,
uses satellites and sophisticated
earth-based antennas to listen to
Soviet and other foreign commu-
nications for analysis. The agencies
control the largest supercomputers
on earth to sort and decipher mil-
itary codes also intercepted by vig-
ilant monitoring of the airwaves.
It was this kind of intelligence
capability that allowed the U.S. mil-
itary earlier this month to track the
movements of Palestinian hijackers
of the Italian cruise ship Achille
Lauro and to intercept Egyptian
communications in a manner that
gave U.S. o icia s a precise under-
standing of every step taken during
the crisis.
One revelation in the manuscript
is that Prime compromised a sen-
sitive detection system used to lo-
cate Soviet ballistic missile subma-
rines when they surface to commu-
nicate with their bases. The project,
code-named Sambo, according to
Kane, was instituted during the
1970s, when the Soviets went to
"burst," or compressed radio trans-
missions, to avoid detection of their
submarine communications.
Says Kane in the manuscript,
"Geoffrey Prime was apprised of
GCHQ's successes against this sys-
tem in 1976, and again notified his
Kremlin masters, thus jeopardizing
the entire defense system of Great
Britain and the U.S.A." Kane states
that Prime's punishment for com-
promising this aspect of British in-
telligence was 14 years of his 35-
year prison sentence.
Kane described GCHQ as having
a staff of 11,000 and an annual bud-
get of more than $700 million,
greater than the combined budgets
of M15 and M16, the bets r known
British intelligence service: "I was
one of a select few in GCHQ and
NSA skilled in activity so sensitive
it was classified MOST Secret,"
Kane states in the book.
Reached by telephone in Eng-
land, Kane said that he and Britain's
National Council for Civil Liberties
were raising money to challenge
the ' injunction. "I cannot discuss
anything in the manuscript, or I will
he up for contempt of court."
Kane alleged in the manuscript
drat due to intelligence sharing be-
tween the United States and Brit-
ain, much of the highly classified
codes and other encryption material
that were lost or compromised by
poor security, at GCHQ posts may
have exposed U.S. intelligence ac-
tivities and, during the period of the
Vietnam War, may have caused the
death of American soldiers who
planned operations with the aid of.
intelligence gathered by the British
in Hong Kong.
In the manuscript, Kane is care-
ful to say that he did not produce
the work to expose any of Britain's
national secrets that were not al-
ready exposed by Prime.
Rather, Kane insists, the manu-
script is designed to call attention
to the history of poor security mea-
sures that have turned GCHQ into a
"negative asset" among western
intelligence agencies.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000505220001-8