As Hollis died in 1973, I may be charged with defaming a very senior public servant who can no longer defend himself. I accept that risk not only because I believe that the seriousness of the implications for national security justify it but because all the allegations against Hollis originated from his own colleagues inside MI5 and from the secret service. None has been concocted or embroidered by me or anyone else outside the security services. Furthermore, Hollis was given ample opportunity to defend himself during his interrogations and made a feeble, unconvincing show of it.
There is the additional factor that had I, or anyone else, undertaken a biography of Hollis, it would have been dishonest to have omitted what must have been the most traumatic period of his life, when he knew that he was suspect and was recalled for a quite hostile interrogation.
If Hollis was a Russian spy, the odds are that he was recruited before he wormed his way into MI5, as I shall describe. So it is small wonder that Whitehall covered up the situation even, I suspect, from prime ministers. Sir Harold Wilson was Prime Minister in the late ’60s when the evidence against Hollis assumed frightening proportions, yet he did not hear about it until 1974, when he agreed to the Trend inquiry and was told in the following year by Sir Michael Hanley, the reigning director general of MI5, that one of his predecessors seemed to have been ‘a renegade working for the other side’. It was at that stage, according to Lady Falkender, his political secretary, whom he had elevated to the peerage, that Wilson emerged from a meeting and said, ‘Now I’ve heard everything. I’ve just been told that the head of MI5 himself may have been a double agent.’ Ironically, Wilson had angrily called the meeting with Hanley to discuss false rumours, believed to have come from MI5 – which they had not – that he and Lady Falkender were running a communist cell in No. 10!
As with the rest of the prime source material in this book, the official evidence against Hollis is presented with the main objective of demonstrating the scale and effectiveness of the threat both from Soviet espionage and subversion and from British agents whose trade is treachery. I have no personal animosity toward Hollis or any member of his family.
During the whole of the decade from 1951 to 1961 MI5 had achieved no major success against the Russians who, following the defeat of the Germans and the advent of the Cold War, had become Britain’s main adversary. Counter-espionage operations against other countries trying to penetrate the national security screen had been more than reasonably successful, but almost every one mounted against the Soviet subversion effort had fallen flat; certain senior officers were wondering why.
The public had been led to believe that the arrest in 1952 of William Marshall, a Foreign Office radio operator who had been recruited to Soviet intelligence while serving in Moscow, had been a counterespionage triumph. In fact, it had been an absolute fluke.
An MI5 surveillance man, alighting from a bus while off duty, had spotted a Soviet intelligence officer, whom he happened to recognise, in intimate conversation with an Englishman. He followed the Englishman home and noted his address. The Englishman turned out to be Marshall, who was then watched and eventually prosecuted for revealing secret information.
Balked of their share of routine successes, a few officers took the initiative and tracked back to try to discover what was going wrong. They discovered that in 1945 a defector from the Russian embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, had alleged that there was a major Soviet spy inside MI5. Gouzenko, whose evidence led to the exposure of a large spy ring in Canada and of another in the United States, still lives, incognito, in Canada. He has recently described to me how he had learned of the existence of a most valuable Soviet spy inside MI5 while he had been working in the main cypher room of Soviet military intelligence (GRU) in Moscow.
I had a desk in what had been the ballroom of a pre-revolutionary mansion. There were about forty of us at a time working in three shifts. I sat next to my friend Lieut. Luibimov and one day he passed me a telegram he had deciphered from the Soviet embassy in London. He said it came from a spy right inside British counter-intelligence in England. The spy’s codename in the secret radio traffic between London and Moscow was ‘Elli’.
Luibimov told me that the spy was so important that he was never contacted personally but through ‘duboks’ – secret hiding places where messages were left and collected. The favourite hiding place was a split in a stone tomb belonging to some person called Brown.
As Gouzenko told the Canadian security authorities, the word ‘Elli’ was also a codename for a British woman spy called Kathleen Willsher in the High Commission office in Ottawa. ‘The Russians often use the same codename for spies in different rings,’ Gouzenko explained. ‘There would be no confusion in secret telegrams between an “Elli” in Ottawa and an “Elli” in London.’
Gouzenko had also revealed that when a senior MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, had decided to travel to Ottawa in 1944 to discuss security issues with Canadian intelligence, this had been leaked in advance to the Russians there by a warning from the Centre in Moscow.
Nothing had been done about these tips, and when Gouzenko was questioned about them again in 1952 he said that it had been a mistake to give them to MI5, where ‘Elli’ himself had probably smothered them. In fact, as I shall describe in greater detail later, the MI5 officer sent out in 1945 to deal with the British aspects of Gouzenko’s defection was Roger Hollis.
The suspicious MI5 officers did not know in 1952 about the treachery of Anthony Blunt, who had spied for Russia inside MI5 from 1940 to 1945. Since then, however, they have proved that Blunt was not ‘Elli’. Blunt worked for the KGB while, at that stage, ‘Elli’ operated for the GRU. Furthermore, according to Gouzenko, ‘Elli’ was able to bring out MI5 files on Soviet intelligence officers so that they could see exactly what was known about themselves. During the war, these files were held at the MI5 out-station at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, while Blunt was located in London.
When Blunt was eventually interrogated in 1964, he said that the Russians had specifically instructed him not to ask for personal files on Soviet intelligence officers unless he had a pressing reason to see them for MI5 purposes, the object being to avoid drawing attention to himself. This was confirmed by the MI5 registry records, which showed that Blunt had rarely consulted them. Hollis, on the other hand, had been evacuated to Blenheim along with his department and, through the nature of his work, had every reason to consult the personal files regularly and did so, as the registry records showed. During his interrogation Blunt accepted that Hollis could well have been ‘Elli’.
The investigators discovered further disconcerting leads hidden in the records.
In 1946, a Russian intelligence officer of the GRU had approached a representative of the British Navy in Japan and offered to defect. Eventually, he gave contact arrangements to enable him to be met in Moscow in case of emergency. Two reports concerning the case had been sent to MI5, where they were handled by Hollis, who instructed a junior officer to make a special file on it and put it away in the registry.
No more had been heard of the intelligence officer until the early ’50s, when another Russian, called Rastvorov, defected to the West in Japan. He insisted on being taken to Australia because he said he knew that British intelligence was penetrated by the KGB and he was frightened to go to Britain or any British-controlled territory. While waiting at a Japanese airport in the aeroplane to take him to Australia, he discovered that it was going via Singapore. He immediately fled to the American embassy and was flown to the United States. There, when debriefed, he explained that he knew that British intelligence was penetrated because a GRU officer who had planned to defect a few years previously had been ‘blown’ by a source in British intelligence and had been caught and shot.
When this news reached Britain, it was assumed that Kim Philby, the secret service man already strongly suspected by MI5 of being a KGB spy, had been the source of the leak, but a different explanation emerged when another Russian defected to the CIA. He c
laimed that he had been the case officer in KGB counter-intelligence who had handled the attempted defection of the GRU man in 1946. He said that copies of both the reports sent from Japan to MI5 had been available to the KGB and that the details of the arrangements for contacting the would-be defector in Moscow had enabled him to be caught. Two KGB officers, posing as British secret service men, had approached the Russian, who had given himself away and had then been shot. The defector was certain that the information had reached the KGB from London. When shown the two documents in the MI5 registry file, he said that they were identical to those he had seen in Moscow, where they were stapled together in the same way. Checks showed that MI5 had been the only place where the two documents had been held together.
Finally, when Philby was eventually interrogated in Beirut, as I shall describe in the next chapter, he strenuously denied having any knowledge of the case. He had no conceivable reason to lie about it and seemed to be taken by surprise by the question. It would, in fact, have been in the KGB’s interest for Philby to have taken the blame.
As the MI5 investigators were only too aware, the dismal records showed that whenever they managed to secure a double agent to work against the Russians in London, his identity was quickly blown. Retrospectively, they examined more than fifty attempts to penetrate the KGB assault in Britain and could not find one that had been run for more than a few weeks without being blown. All these operations could have failed as a result of leaks, and the failure of many of them could be explained in no other way. Sometimes, when the KGB tried to recruit a university student, he would report the fact to MI5 and offer to accept but really to work against the Russians. Whenever this happened, the Russians found out so quickly that they must have been in touch with an MI5 officer with access to that very secret information. Hollis was the head of the branch dealing with anti-Soviet counter-espionage.
Similarly, whenever MI5 secured advance information about a meeting between a Soviet intelligence officer and one of his British agents, the ‘watchers’, as the surveillance experts are called, would be carefully stationed, but the meeting would not take place. The cause of these persistent failures appeared to be so obvious that even the young daughter of a retired MI5 officer, who was herself working in the organisation, told her father that there must be a spy in it.
One of the most suspicious incidents concerned what has become known as ‘the Arago affair’. In the autumn of 1957, a cypher clerk in the Czech embassy in Washington, who had been recruited as a spy by the American FBI, gave some intriguing information that was passed to MI5. The clerk, known by the codename ‘Arago’, said that during a visit to intelligence headquarters in Prague, he had talked at length with Colonel Oldrich Pribyl, the Czech military attaché in London. Pribyl maintained, because of something that had recently happened to him, that the Russians must have had a marvellous spy in MI5 who was always on tap. He described how he had been debriefing one of several British traitors he had recruited; to avoid being overheard, this took place while driving his car through London. He had become aware that he was being followed by what he thought was an MI5 vehicle, but, after taking evasive action, he believed that he had outwitted it.
Pribyl then told ‘Arago’ that he was so concerned that MI5 might know the identity of his agent, he decided to consult the Russian military attaché in London. He saw him on the Friday of a bank holiday weekend, and the Russian explained that, because of the holiday, it might take a little longer than usual to find out exactly what MI5 knew, but he expected to have the answer by Tuesday. Sure enough, on that day, the Russian told Pribyl that MI5 watchers had indeed been following him but had given up the chase because they had decided that he was only giving a colleague driving instruction. This information horrified MI5 because it was correct.
Further facts provided by ‘Arago’ strengthened the belief that there must be a very active spy inside MI5. Pribyl had also related how the Russian had warned him that the MI5 men who tailed Soviet bloc cars had just changed their tactics. Instead of waiting near the communist embassies, where they could be too easily seen, they were waiting by the main Thames bridges that the Soviet bloc spies were likely to use. This ruse, which had been immediately betrayed to the Soviet embassy, had been abandoned within a fortnight because no Russians came near the bridges.
The talkative Pribyl had also told ‘Arago’ about a British spy for the Czechs, Brian Linney, who was providing highly secret information about a new RAF missile – information that he had picked up while working as an engineer in a factory at Shoreham in Sussex. In conjunction with the police, MI5, which by itself has no power of arrest, wanted to swoop immediately after Linney had handed material to Pribyl and to arrest them both. They knew all the arrangements for the crunch meeting, but, while Linney turned up, Pribyl never left his office. Linney was eventually convicted in 1958 only because he was bluffed into confessing the details of his treachery. This cost the RAF £8 million, as they were forced to make necessary changes to the missile to counter what the Russians knew.
The investigators were driven to conclude that the Russians knew where the MI5 watchers were going to be stationed, wherever they were sent. Also, when the surveillance men decided in advance to vary the frequencies of the radio network they used to keep in touch with each other, the Russians seemed to know and were always able to listen in.
On one occasion, all the watchers in London were sent to the Midlands to assist in a most secret operation, which turned out to be a fool’s errand, almost certainly organised by Russian disinformation so that the KGB could have a free hand in London for a few days. On the day that the watchers left London, the Russians turned off the radio-listening equipment on the roof of the Soviet embassy, which they normally used to tune in to the watchers’ walkie-talkie sets! When the watchers returned, in as unobtrusive a way as possible, the Russians switched it on.
The director general, Sir Roger Hollis, was informed of these disturbing events but seemed unimpressed.
Having access to an ingenious device, new at the time, called the probe microphone, MI5 was keen to use it in counter-espionage work against the Soviet consulate in Bayswater Road, which was known to harbour several dangerous KGB spies. Knowing the details of the building, MI5 technicians were able to bore a hole through a party wall so that it came out behind a moulded leaf in the high frieze of a specially selected room of the consulate. The hole, where it emerged behind the leaf, was no wider than a pin and there was no way in which it could have been detected by accident. The microphone operated successfully for only a short time. At a later date, when a chance opportunity presented itself to an inside agent who is no longer active, examination of the pinhole showed that it had been plugged up with plaster, rendering the whole apparatus useless. The MI5 officers involved in the operation were in no doubt that it had been betrayed by a source that could only be inside MI5.
As the investigators continued the analysis of their failures into the ’60s, they were particularly angered by the frustration of a most important operation by what they interpreted as yet another high-level leak. They had been convinced for many years that the British Communist Party was in regular receipt of substantial sums of money from the Soviet government. That was the only way that the party and its widespread activities could be kept going; the various appeals were merely a cover.
It was also known that the Russians were careful not to use their Narodny Bank for such transactions but delivered the money in cash to a senior party member who served as paymaster. Transfers of cash in shoe boxes had been observed, but what MI5 wanted to see were the ledgers showing how the Russian money was dispersed and whether any was used for espionage and subversion purposes.
In the early ’60s, the current paymaster lived in a two-story house divided into two single-floor flats. One day, it was seen that he was advertising for a tenant for the bottom flat, so the security men applied for it through an agency and installed a ‘granny’, as such women agents are called.
Nevertheless, the moment the paymaster returned home, on the day after Boxing Day, he gave the ‘granny’ a week’s notice, refusing to give any reason. The MI5 top management had been told about the projected operation only two days beforehand, its approval being necessary before the flat could be entered.
It was considered most unlikely that any of the paymaster’s neighbours could have told him about the preparations for the raid on his flat. Watchers had been stationed to forestall this, and the presence of the extra people in the flat below had been covered in the guise of a Christmas party given by the ‘granny’ for friends and relations.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 2