42 • BENTON, KENNETH
raphist. In 1952 Bennett returned to England as the head of the
Middle East Section and then switched to General Search, monitor-
ing Soviet wireless traffic. In March 1954 he emigrated to Canada,
intending to join GCHQ’s counterpart, the Communications Branch
of the National Research Council, but the expected job offer never
materialized so in July 1954 he joined the Royal Canadian
Mounted Policeas a civilian research analyst and participated in
keystone, the supervision of a KGBdouble agentcodenamed
gideon.
gideondisappeared in Moscow in 1958, betrayed by one of Ben-
nett’s closest friends in the Mounties, Jim Morrison. By then Bennett
had been promoted to head of B Branch’s Russian desk, the fulcrum
of the organization’s Sovietcounterespionageoperations, and the
director of E Branch, a post he was to keep until he himself came
under investigation, in an inquiry codenamedgridiron, as a possible
mole. The basis of thegridironmole hunt, to whichMI5contrib-
uted, was a long history of failed operations, frustrated attempts to
run technical surveillance on the Soviets, and hard-to-explain coinci-
dences and the embarrassing fact thatfeatherbed, a review of So-
viet penetration of the civil service, had turned up no suspects, apart
from a Cambridge-educated ex-ambassador, Herbert Norman, who
had been identified to MI5 as a spy byAnthony Blunt, but had com-
mitted suicide in 1957. Another suspect, John Watkins, a homosexual
diplomat who had beenhoneytrappedin Moscow, died in October
1964 in a Montreal hotel while under interrogation by Bennett.
Thegridironinvestigation lasted two years; Bennett was interro-
gated in March 1972 and protested his innocence. He took early re-
tirement from the Security Service in 1972 and emigrated to Perth,
Australia, where he still lives. Following the collapse of the Soviet
Union, evidence has emerged from Moscow that theKGBwent to
considerable lengths to incriminate Bennett, who had never been a
mole.BENTON, KENNETH.Kenneth Benton exercised considerable dis-
cretion over his covert career, which began during the war with an
invitation to join the Iberian subsection ofSection Vof theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS) and a subsequent posting to Madrid.
When he was elected chairman of the Crime Writers’ Guild, a cov-