Lord Kim Darroch, who had access to Britain’s top secrets for nearly a decade during his roles as national security adviser and UK ambassador to the United States, said understanding the Russian leader’s motivations was the “gold dust ” which both London and Washington were desperate for. to succeed. “The real gold dust would be anyone who could give us information about what Putin is saying and his immediate, very small environment, including instructions from Putin to the military and so on,” he told Mr Kerbaj. “And whether we can pull that off really depends on whether we have a source right in the center – someone who would personally be in an extremely dangerous position. There have been such people in the past.” Throughout the Cold War, major intelligence breakthroughs were made by Russian defectors such as: Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa, who revealed Joseph Stalin’s ambition for nuclear supremacy after the Second World War; Oleg Penkovsky, who revealed the Kremlin’s intent in the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s; and Oleg Lyalin, who revealed the extent of the Soviet spy network in Britain and the US in 1971. Also revealed in The History of the Five Eyes, which looks at decades of intelligence sharing between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is Putin’s alleged contempt for MI5. Recalling a briefing she gave the Russian president in London after the 2005 London Underground bombings, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of Britain’s counter-intelligence and domestic security agency, said she insensitively blamed MI5 for the attack , which left 52 dead. . “He said, ‘It is the duty of the security service officer to stand between the terrorist and the victim,’” Baroness Manningham-Buller recalled of the meeting. “The implication there was that we failed at our job – which to some extent was true – but it was a hostile statement to him.” Eager to maintain intelligence ties after 9/11 and the terror attacks in the UK capital, however, he said British officials had offered the Russians a return visit. But the invitation was rescinded after Moscow poisoned one of its dissidents, Alexander Litvinenko, in London, and relations were never repaired. The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, Through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies is released on September 1.
