ROBERTS, ALFRED• 459Rimington served in all MI5’s branches and in 1980 spent three
years in K3 running Soviet Bloc agents in England. She then joined
the countersubversion branch as an assistant director before moving
tocounterterrorism, where she was appointed director. At the end
of 1990 she succeeded David Ransom as one of the two deputy direc-
tor-generals, and two years later took over fromSir Patrick Walker.
After her retirement, Rimington caused consternation in Whitehall
by writing her memoirs,Open Secret, and was much criticized be-
cause she had prevented so many other colleagues from taking the
same course.ROBERTS, ALFRED.An employee of Kodak, Alfred ‘‘Ken’’ Roberts
was a trade union activist campaigning for trade union recognition in
January 1964 when he was prosecuted under the Prevention of Cor-
ruption Act for selling proprietorial photographic processing secrets
to the East Germans via adouble agent, Dr. Jean-Paul Soupert.
None of the information compromised by Roberts or his friend Geof-
frey Conway was classified.MI5’s code name for the investigation
wasair bubble.
At the time, there were two photographic factories in East Ger-
many, plants owned prewar by Agfa and Kodak, which the East Ger-
mans had been unable to modernize. Handicapped by Western
patents, they were in need of technical knowledge to improve the
poor quality of the local photographic paper and processes.
Originally from Yorkshire, Roberts had moved to Kodak’s factory
in Harrow from the metal merchants Johnson Matthey and had been
recruited into theCommunist Party of Great Britainby a porter,
Dick Payne. Called up for war service in theRoyal Air Force(RAF)
as a flight mechanic, Roberts had been posted to South Africa and
India and had continued to be active politically, participating in the
strike committee during the RAF mutiny in Cawnpore. Upon his re-
turn to England, Roberts went back to his job with Kodak and in May
1951 was invited to Moscow on a trade union–sponsored trip to the
annual May Day celebrations. Several more visits followed, and Rob-
erts was cultivated as a source for information about Kodak’s chemi-
cal processes. His contact was Soupert, alias ‘‘Dr. Harry Stevens,’’
whom he met occasionally in Ostend.
When Soupert became a double agent for the Belgian Surete ́,he