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372 INTO THE THATCHER ERA
to let him gO.13 Just like Western intelligence, the KGB was
riven by interdepartm~ntaljealousies. Ideally, Prime should have
been run by a KGB officer based in Britain, which would have
offered him the support and companionship that is critical to
the successful development of a spy. However, these activities
were controlled by the First Directorate of the KGB, which
undertook espionage. Arguably, had Prime been handled by the
First Directorate he might well have lasted longer and done
much more damage. 14
Once back in England, Prime began his employment with
GCHQ. By night he received radio messages, and was told about
a dead-letter drop location at Esher in Surrey. There he found
a note of congratulations and another payment of £400.
Energised, he now went to work with his Minox, copying GCHQ
documents at home and initially sending them on to his control
in East Berlin in the form of microdots. He communicated with
his handlers through a short-wave radio, encyphering his
messages using one-time pads. More dead-letter boxes were
developed in the Abbey Wood area of south-east London and
at Banstead railway station in Surrey. His meetings with
controllers were rare and almost always abroad, reflecting
Prime's rather awkward Third Directorate ownership. He seems
to have rendezvoused with them in Vienna in 1969, Ireland in
1970, Rome in 1970 and Cyprus in 1972. He preferred these
personal meetings, since the dead-letter boxes could not accommodate
the large number of films his espionage was producing.J5
Nevertheless, he made some use of dead-letter boxes in Britain.
MI5's Stella Rimington recalls that he used classic tradecraft,
including an empty Coca-Cola can, to convey messages, as well
as chalk marks on telegraph poles and trees. 16
Although Prime now worked for GCHQ, he was not based
in Cheltenham. Instead, he was part of a translator pool called
the London Processing Group (LPG), a curious leftover from
the MI6 Y Section which had run the Berlin tunnel operation
in the 1950s. A large and varied group of translators had been
assembled at the LPG offices in Carlton Gardens. Some of them