470 • SCARLETT, JOHN
been baffled by its simplicity but could not make it work. At Marconi
a young technician namedPeter Wrightexperimented with the ap-
paratus for 10 weeks before he found that the sensitive diaphragm
inside the capsule resonated at 800 Megahertz, the length of the an-
tenna, when bombarded with radio waves. He also determined that
the diaphragm modulated when there were other sources of sound
waves nearby, such as voices, and that the emissions could be de-
tected and converted into speech. Thus while the equipment, devoid
of any moving parts, seemed unsophisticated, it was actually a work
of technical genius, acting passively, without electric power, and
transmitting whatever conversations were held in its vicinity to a re-
ceiver up to 300 yards away.
In May 1960 Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, produced the seal in the Security Council as an ex-
ample ofKGBduplicity, much to the undisguised mirth of the Soviet
delegation. Regarded as a breakthrough in clandestine surveillance,
satyrwas adopted by MI5 as a useful system for monitoring conver-
sations without the necessity of replacing batteries.SCARLETT, JOHN.A careerSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) offi-
cer and later chairman of theJoint Intelligence Committee(JIC),
Scarlett was SIS’s head of station in Moscow when he negotiated
with Yevgeni Primakov, the director of the Russian intelligence ser-
vice SVR, an agreement that would result in the declaration of each
other’s liaison personnel. According to Primakov’s account, con-
tained in his memoirAu Coeur de Pouvoir(‘‘At the heart of power’’),
published in France, Scarlett offered to cooperate on condition that
the SVR andGRUreduced their presence in London, and this took
two years to achieve.
After his expulsion from Moscow, following the arrest of one of
his agents, Scarlett supervised theMitrokhinproject, which resulted
in the publication ofThe Mitrokhin Archive, and he was appointed
chairman of the JIC in 2001. He was called to give evidence to the
Hutton Inquiryin August 2003 following the death ofDavid Kelly,
whom he had suspected of leaking information to the media. In Au-
gust 2004 he was appointed chief of theSecret Intelligence Service
in succession toSir Richard Dearlove.