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EMBASSY WARS 185
to follow Kuznetsov's unknown British contact, to identify who
was passing information to the KGB. The man had no streetcraft,
and was easily tailed to an address in Elborough Street at
Earlsfield in Wandsworth. MI5 kept watch, and also engaged in
letter interception. The contact was soon revealed to be William
Marshall, a Radio Operator for the Diplomatic Wireless Service
(DWS), the radio network at Hanslope Park that the Foreign
Office had inherited from SIS at the end of the war. 3 Although
Marshall had only joined the DWS in November 1948, he had
undertaken some interesting work. Having been trained in the
Royal Signals imr.lediately after the war, he did eight months
of duty at Hanslope and was then sent to the British Embassy
in Cairo. SIS had just moved its offices, induding its transmitters,
from the Cairo Embassy to the military headquarters at
Ismailia. Because SIS was short of Radio Operators, DWS lent
it three of its people, induding Marshall. His next posting was
the British Embassy in Moscow, where he spent a year between
December 1950 and December 1951. 4
Marshall had almost certainly been recruited by the KGB
during his sojourn in Moscow. The Security Department of the
Foreign Office, run by William Carey-Foster, began to make
background enquiries. Carey-Foster asked British diplomats in
Moscow for information, asking whether there was anything
odd about Marshall. One of the diplomats there offered a frank
and revealing reply:
*
Marshall was a perfect example of the type who should
not be sent here. He was an introvert, anti-social to a degree
I have never seen before. At staff cocktail parties he would
be found in a corner behind a screen, if he turned up at
all, or in some other obscure spot. He was most difficult
to draw into conversation, and he had a meanness which
it would be difficult to surpass. If asked to give a cigarette
to a colleague, he would ask for a cigarette back the
following day.
*