Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

As Lord Denning based his report on the evidence of witnesses, one or more of them must have convinced him that Ivanov’s request about the atomic weapons was of little consequence. The chief MI5 witness was Sir Roger Hollis.

  Because of the mention of the War Minister, the MI5 officer’s report on his interview with Ward was drawn to Hollis’s personal attention. His reaction, or lack of it, was quite remarkable. Ivanov was an accredited diplomat and was clearly overstepping his proper function by trying to induce a friend to suborn influential people to secure secret NATO information. Hollis should therefore have reported the matter to the Foreign Office, either directly or indirectly through his proper channel, the Home Office. Instead, he sat on the information and did not warn the Foreign Office even that Ivanov was a Soviet intelligence officer until a year later, in June 1962!

  Even then he seems to have moved only because he found out that the Foreign Office was being informed independently, and at the highest level, about Ivanov’s activities. Ward had secured a meeting with the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Harold Caccia (now Lord), to promote Ivanov as a medium for discussing Anglo–Soviet problems such as Berlin and the Oder–Neisse line.

  Later, in October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, Ivanov used Ward to try to contact Caccia again to suggest that Britain should take the initiative by calling a summit conference in London. Ivanov was prepared to assure Caccia that Khrushchev would attend such a conference. He would never have dared to give such an assurance without Khrushchev’s agreement, so this was fair evidence that the game was being played at the highest levels.

  Rightly, the Foreign Office refused to do business with either Ward or Ivanov, but no thanks were due to the director general of MI5, who had neglected to warn it that Ivanov was a professional spy for more than a year.

  If the Foreign Office had been properly warned in good time, the Soviet ambassador could have been advised of Ivanov’s excesses, and, if these had continued, Ivanov could have been expelled as persona non grata. In that case, the Profumo scandal might never have reached such horrendous proportions. That Ivanov was still active in Britain while Wigg was making his inquiries and the story was breaking greatly exacerbated the security implications.

  To return to the germination of the scandal in the summer of 1961, the only quick action Hollis took on receiving the case officer’s report on the interview with Ward was to pass the buck to Scotland Yard by suggesting that Special Branch should make some inquiries about Ward and Keeler. After this had produced no results whatever, Hollis then decided that Profumo ought to be warned to be careful about what he said to Ward. In addition, he initiated action that showed incredible lack of judgement or something worse.

  Avoiding any direct contact with the War Minister or any other, as was his wont, Hollis went to see the secretary to the Cabinet, then Sir Norman Brook. He asked him to warn Profumo, then followed it up with the suggestion that, at the same time, he should ask Profumo if he would help in inducing Ivanov to defect to the West.

  By any standards, this was an outrageous suggestion. No minister of the crown should ever be embroiled in espionage or counterespionage. Nothing would have served the Soviet purpose better than for Profumo to have agreed to cooperate and to have made a personal pass at Ivanov to encourage him to defect. Ivanov could have reported it to his ambassador, and then all kinds of political capital could have been made out of the situation. Profumo might have found himself under threat of blackmail, the KGB being prepared to withhold publicity about the incident if he agreed to be ‘helpful’. Or it could have been leaked to the Labour opposition, which could have used it to savage effect.

  It is a tribute to Hollis’s quiet powers of persuasion that he was able to induce the normally cautious Sir Norman Brook to raise the possibility with Profumo, who rejected it out of hand. Brook would have served his Prime Minister, and his country, better had he told Macmillan that his director general of security was seriously lacking in judgement.

  Hollis’s motive in trying to embroil Profumo in the defection attempt is made all the more suspicious by the fact that the reports from Ward, from the MI5 case officer and from the secret service in Moscow all showed that Ivanov was a totally committed communist, as is underlined in the Denning Report. The chances that he might defect were minimal.

  Ward’s willing cooperation with MI5 is also a matter for conjecture. He admired the Soviet regime and sympathised with communists in Britain, advocating their cause to his friends so intensely that some reported him. He was personally fond of Ivanov and was relying on him to provide facilities for a visit to Moscow. Could it be, therefore, that Ward was feeding information into MI5 on Ivanov’s instructions as part of the KGB’s exploitation of the situation?

  If Hollis’s delay in informing the Foreign Office about Ivanov was reprehensible, his consistent failure to inform ministers, in spite of warnings from junior officers, was little short of criminal. As director general of MI5, he had a personal responsibility to the Home Secretary and right of access to the Prime Minister. He carefully avoided exercising either until the Profumo situation was beyond repair. On 21 March 1963, George Wigg, who had received further evidence indirectly from Keeler, including the atomic bomb allegation, raised the matter in the Commons. From that moment, a public scandal was assured, especially after Profumo foolishly denied his intimacy with Keeler.

  Though Hollis had been put in the picture in the summer of 1961 and had been intimately involved ever since, coldly watching the tragedy unfold day by day, he had given no information whatsoever to the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke. The Home Secretary was in the embarrassing position of knowing nothing about the matter that Wigg had raised. Only on 27 March 1963 was Brooke given the background, after he had taken the initiative and sent for Hollis.

  By that time, as a result of a tip-off, as Denning records, Ivanov had skipped out of Britain on 29 January, and Hollis skilfully used his absence to excuse his lack of action on the case. He said that all security interest had ceased as soon as Ivanov had left Britain and argued that, if Profumo had been sharing a mistress with Ivanov, there could be security interest, but, as Ivanov had gone, all risk had disappeared with him.

  This was a specious argument because it is standard practice to continue inquiries into the activities of a known KGB agent long after he has left the country – as witness the interrogation of Anthony Blunt about his Russian contacts, who had been out of Britain for at least ten years.

  Hollis told Denning that he did not learn of Profumo’s sexual association with Keeler until the end of January 1963, which, by strange coincidence, was exactly the time that Ivanov was warned and scurried to safety in Moscow. From discussions with senior officials intimately concerned with the Profumo case, I have reason to believe that Hollis’s statement was untrue. It would be difficult to believe if only because MI5 had such close contact with Ward and his entourage. Whether MI5 watchers had seen Profumo with Keeler or not, there was plenty of talk about their relationship in the Ward households, as Keeler testified, and much of this was retailed to MI5. Hollis made much of his belief that it was none of MI5’s business to involve itself in any minister’s private affairs, but in the special circumstances, with Ivanov around, most counter-espionage chiefs would have felt it incumbent on them to satisfy themselves with some inquiries.

  Instead, three days after Ivanov was out of the country – on 1 February 1963 – Hollis had issued this ruling: ‘Until further notice no approach should be made to anyone in the Ward galère, or to any other outside contact in respect of it. If we are approached we listen only.’

  This ruling astonished those of his officers who could see the dangers ahead for the government. Whatever Hollis’s reasons for issuing it, this was the decision the Russians would have liked most – no further inquiries into Ivanov or any of his contacts. Even if people came forward to volunteer information, no action was to be taken on it.

  Hollis’s director of counter-espionage was so concerned about the
lack of action and its likely consequences that he put his view on record in a memorandum to the director general, dated 4 February. It ran:

  If a scandal results from Mr Profumo’s association with Christine Keeler, there is likely to be a considerable political rumpus … If, in any subsequent inquiries, we were found to have been in possession of this information about Profumo and to have taken no action on it, we would, I am sure, be subject to much criticism for failing to bring it to light. I suggest that this information be passed to the Prime Minister and you might also like to consider whether or not, before doing so, we should interview Miss Keeler.

  That was clearly a plea from a man who had the interests both of his service and of the government at heart, and Hollis was later to admit, with a rueful expression, that it was ‘filled with prophetic insight’. Having read it and discussed it with his deputy, whom he always overbore, Hollis decided to ignore it. He argued that the whole affair was a political issue and, therefore, not MI5’s concern. Thereupon, he issued another firm instruction against any further investigations.

  He also continued with his policy of failing to inform Macmillan, who remained deprived of the facts for so long that the Labour opposition was eventually able to make a laughing stock of him in the House as the ‘didn’t know Prime Minister’.

  When Hollis had been summoned by the Home Secretary, one of the things he told Brooke was about Ivanov’s request to Ward for the delivery date of American atomic bombs to the Luftwaffe. This was the first time that this information had been given to any minister, though Hollis had known about it for more than a year and a half!

  Another matter that Brooke raised with Hollis was the possibility of prosecuting Ward under the Official Secrets Act. After a few days’ deliberation, Hollis advised against it, knowing that without Ivanov as a witness there was no chance of a conviction. The police pursued Ward on a charge of living on immoral earnings, and while on bail he died of a drug overdose.

  On 29 May, by which time maximum damage had been done to the government, the results of the police inquiries reached the Prime Minister’s private secretary. He immediately alerted Macmillan to the implications, and the Prime Minister summoned Hollis to No. 10 Downing Street. For the first time, he learned the full security aspects of the affair, including the Ward–Keeler project for securing the atomic bomb information from Profumo.

  Macmillan recorded Hollis’s visit in At the End of the Day: the MI5 chief presented the project as though ‘atomic secrets’ of a technical nature had been involved. This was also the impression conveyed to me when I discussed the matter with Mr Macmillan recently. This enabled Hollis to secure Macmillan’s agreement that the Ward–Keeler project was a ‘ridiculous story’ because Profumo had no ‘information concerning atomic secrets’. In fact, of course, all Ivanov had been after was a date, which Profumo could well have known.

  Until that meeting with Hollis, all Macmillan had really known was that Profumo had been involved in what he called ‘a silly scrape over a woman’ whom he had met at a ‘raffish party’ at Cliveden and that this woman was said to ‘share her favours’ with the Russian naval attaché. He had not known even that until 4 February 1963, and the information had come to his office from a newspaperman, not from MI5.

  The Chancellor of the day, the late Lord Dilhorne, who was a close friend of mine, believed that Hollis was grossly at fault for keeping the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary in ignorance for so long but was averse to any public criticism of him on that score because it would draw attention to MI5, which ought to remain as secret as possible.

  When the public interest in the affair was at its height, a KGB officer, working in UN headquarters in New York, tried to exacerbate it. This Russian, who had the codename ‘Fedora’, was working as a double agent, passing information to the FBI that Hoover rated so highly that he sent some of it to the White House. ‘Fedora’ claimed that, after Ivanov had left London, he had met him in Moscow and had a long conversation with him. He alleged that Ivanov told him that he had installed a microphone in Christine Keeler’s bedroom and that, by listening to her pillow talk, had obtained most valuable intelligence.

  Hoover passed a copy of this report to President Kennedy with the suggestion that he might like to inform Harold Macmillan of its contents. Kennedy put it at the bottom of his pending tray, saying, ‘I reckon that Mr Macmillan is in enough trouble already.’ ‘Fedora’s’ statement, which eventually reached MI5, was almost certainly false, though it is possible that Ivanov had been boasting in Moscow. Experts from MI5 had examined Keeler’s bedroom closely and had decided that it was unbuggable.

  Further evidence has since accrued that most of ‘Fedora’s’ material was deliberate KGB disinformation. He even fed in information, at one stage, that the Profumo scandal had been engineered by French intelligence, not the KGB. He also claimed that there was a Soviet spy inside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, which turned out to be false and wasted much time.

  Macmillan’s sorry plight during the eventual debate on the Profumo affair in Parliament on 17 June was described by George Wigg in his autobiography:

  The Prime Minister’s defence contained some amazing admissions … Three separate statements by Miss Keeler that she had been asked by Ward to obtain military information from Profumo had likewise never reached the Prime Minister – an admission that evoked the jibe ‘Nobody ever tells me anything!’ That summed up the Prime Minister’s case.

  As a journalist involved in the Profumo inquiries at high level in Whitehall, I had known all the facts long before Macmillan did, and, as I witnessed the Prime Minister’s embarrassment from the press gallery, I spotted Sir Roger Hollis sitting not far away. I knew nothing then of the suspicion against him, which analysis of his behaviour in the Profumo case was to fortify, but I wondered what was going on in his mind as he sat there, surveying the shambles, unknown to most people, expressionless and hunched in his seat.

  It is inescapable that, for whatever reason, Hollis played the Profumo case long, thereby ensuring, whether deliberately or not, that maximum damage would accrue to the government. He did as little as possible as late as possible.

  It was suggested to Lord Denning, as he recorded in his report,

  that Ivanov filled a new role in Russian technique. It was to divide the United Kingdom from the United States by these devious means. If Ministers or prominent people can be placed in compromising positions, or made the subject of damaging rumour, or the security service can be made to appear incompetent, it may weaken the confidence of the United States in our integrity and reliability.

  With all respect to Lord Denning, this observation was stating the obvious because it had been an objective of the Soviet espionage and disinformation service since the start of the Cold War in the late ’40s, and even before. His conclusion, however, was beyond criticism. ‘If this was the object of Captain Ivanov, with Ward as his tool, he succeeded only too well.’

  There can be little doubt that this brilliantly successful exercise in Soviet subversion, taking maximum advantage of a sudden opportunity, was conducted by the Centre in Moscow, with Ivanov taking day-to-day instructions. Horrific though it may seem, senior officers of MI5 were driven by the facts to suspect that the day-to-day moves of their chief, Sir Roger Hollis, had been similarly orchestrated.

  It is clear from the Denning Report that Hollis made highly effective use of the guidelines laid down to govern the activities of MI5 when trying to explain his behaviour, as he did later when interrogated about his strange actions during the Blunt case. He stressed that, under a directive issued by a former Home Secretary in 1952, MI5’s task was the defence of the realm as a whole and that no inquiry was to be carried out unless those directing MI5 were satisfied that an important public interest was at stake.

  In retrospect, there can be no doubt that an important public interest was at stake and that it bore directly on the defence of the realm. So, at best, Hollis was guilty of
a series of faulty judgements.

  Though Hollis was not an impressive figure, Denning was impressed by his arguments and made every excuse for him in his report, as anyone who reads it must appreciate. The phenomenal mystique attached to the post of director general of MI5 automatically ensures that any incumbent will generate a considerable degree of awe, however disappointing his exterior. Any hesitancy in answering a question tends to be interpreted as laudable care in avoiding unnecessary disclosure, while a poor response, accompanied by a smile, tends instinctively to be accepted as the best that can be expected in view of the poor chap’s terrible burden of state secrets. Obviously, there are things he cannot possibly even hint at, so we must give him the benefit of every possible doubt and avoid embarrassing him by pressing him too hard.

  There was an additional factor affecting the report that came to my notice only very recently. Shortly before he died, Lord Dilhorne wrote to me, saying, ‘I suspect that I was the only person who saw Tom Denning’s report before he submitted it. He made a number of alterations at my suggestion.’ These may have been implied criticisms of the security service and its director general, which, at the time, the Lord Chancellor deplored ‘in the national interest’.

  Lord Dilhorne also claimed that, when writing his report, Lord Denning had the benefit of a long document on the affair that he, as the Lord Chancellor, had prepared at the request of Macmillan before it was thought necessary to have an independent report for public consumption. ‘You never saw the report I made,’ Lord Dilhorne wrote in jest. ‘It was, I think, only seen by Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Tom Denning, who used so much of it that I could have successfully sued him for breach of copyright!’

  In that report, which has never been published, Lord Dilhorne accused the MI5 chiefs of at least one bad error of judgement in failing to alert the Prime Minister.

  Though Sir Roger Hollis was not in the habit of expressing his feelings and deplored any publicity about his department so much that he vetoed even laudatory accounts of its wartime work by distinguished colleagues such as the late Sir John Masterman, I am told that he was more than satisfied with the Denning Report, though it revealed more about the secret machinations of MI5 than had ever been told officially before.