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SECURITY SCANDALS AND SPY REVELATIONS 233
found himself getting into debt once more. His marriage was
increasingly troubled, and he had started to drink. He resumed
contact, and at the next meeting things turned nasty. Vasiley
turned up with a woman who he introduced as his wife. The
woman, almost certainly another KGB officer, produced a photograph
of Britten receiving money from Yuri in London. They
said that if he failed to cooperate, 'this photo would be sent to
the British intelligence services and I could expect some rough
treatment at their hands'. With a sinking feeling he realised that
he had been trapped. Everything he had been warned about in
security lectures came flooding back. He continued to meet his
controllers every four months. All the time 'pressure was being
applied'. The KGB had clearly identified him as a weak character,
and this was now a coercive relationship.I5
The KGB demanded that Britten provide details of sigint activities,
together with 'telecommunications information' on
Britain's signals networks. He was given a Minox camera, a type
much favoured by professional spies, and asked to take photos
of the inside of his monitoring building, where the operators
sat in serried ranks in headphones, but this proved difficult,
since he was never alone there. Pressure was put on him to
identify other vulnerable individuals. 'I was asked to note and
report the bad people in my unit,' he recalled, 'including officers
with mistresses: Vasiley also wanted to know whether 'any
of my colleagues indulged in wife-swapping parties or any of
the wives prostituted themselves to English or local males'. Such
individuals would be ideal victims for future KGB efforts at
blackmail. Britten said it would take him a while to discover
these things, but Vasiley seemed content, and replied: 'Time is
on our side, and we are in no hurry: Britten was clear in his
own mind that he was being used as 'a spotter for potential
talent'. Eventually, he recalled, 'I passed my contacts the names
of three airmen on my unit who could be recruited by them:
He also supplied general military intelligence, and spent much
time driving around the island collecting order of battle information
at bases like Dhekelia. 16 The transport he used was a