Six Moments of Crisis by Bennett Gill;

Author:Bennett, Gill;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

Edward Heath (right) and Sir Alec Douglas-Home (left), 1970

5

Challenging the KGB

Operation FOOT, September 1971

The expulsion of 105 spies was the most important security action ever taken by any Western government.*

On a cool but sunny Tuesday afternoon, 21 September 1971, Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath held a secret meeting of ministers and senior officials in 10 Downing Street, to decide whether and when to tell the Soviet government that a large number of its representatives in the United Kingdom, employed in their embassy, trade delegation, and other organizations, were to be expelled for ‘inadmissible activities’—in other words, spying. The codename for the proposed operation, whose details were classified top secret, was FOOT.1 Three days later, Sir Denis Greenhill, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), gave a shocked Ivan Ippolitov, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires, a list of 105 officials who had to go. Those in the country must leave within two weeks; those currently overseas would not be allowed to return. What is more, the Soviets would not be permitted to replace the expelled officials. ‘We have’, said Greenhill, ‘been patient long enough.’2

Operation FOOT remains the single largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any country.3 London had often engaged with Moscow in tit-for-tat expulsions of a few diplomats at a time, the most recent episode only a few months earlier in 1971. It was part of the Cold War game. A move on the scale of Operation FOOT was, however, unprecedented, and sent shock waves through not just the Kremlin, but through the international community as a whole (not least because such a dramatic stroke seemed distinctly un-British). Espionage may be a fact of life, but governments rarely talk of it openly nor bring it willingly to public notice. We now know, from sources such as the material smuggled out of the USSR by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin,4 that Soviet espionage in the 1960s and 1970s was massive both in scope and in numbers. Most Western governments had taken steps in the 1960s to try and cut down the number of Soviet representatives (or at least to demand similar increases for their own Moscow staffs). But a mass expulsion of spies, instead of quietly asking them to leave individually, would undoubtedly attract widespread publicity, and no one knew how the Soviet government, under Party leader Leonid Brezhnev, might react. How did the Conservative government elected in June 1970 and led by Edward Heath come to such a bold—some thought foolhardy—decision?

Full details of Operation FOOT and the events that led up to it were not made public officially by the British government until 1998, though the expulsion of the Soviet officials was widely reported in the media at the time, with photographs of queues of disconsolate Russians waiting to board aeroplanes at Heathrow.5 A few of those involved have mentioned the episode in their memoirs, with varying degrees of discretion but with a universal tendency to claim credit for the decision—understandably, since in hindsight Operation FOOT was a Cold War coup for the British government both in intelligence and foreign policy terms.

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