Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Once the shape of the FLUENCY allegations became clear I began the most dangerous task I ever undertook. Without authorization I began to make my own "freelance" inquiries into Hollis' background. I had to be cautious, since I knew that the slightest leak back would inevitably lead to the sack. I traveled down to Oxford, and visited the Bodleian Library. There I discovered in the university records that Hollis, although he went up to Oxford in the 1920s, never took a degree. He left inexplicably after five terms. It seemed an odd thing for so conventional a man to do. I visited Hollis' old college, Worcester, and searched the records there to find out who had lived on the same staircase. In his fourth term Hollis moved to digs in Wellington Square, and I checked through the Oxford Calendars, which list the addresses of every student resident at Oxford, to find those students with whom he shared a house. I even tried the records of the University Golfing Society in the hope that somewhere there would be a clue to the enigma of Hollis' personality.

  Working without Hollis' record of service, I was forced to work blind. I knew from talking to Hollis that he had visited China, so I ran a trace through the Passport Office for the dates of his arrivals and departures from Britain. I made discreet inquiries at the Standard Chartered Bank, where Hollis worked before leaving for China, but apart from an old forwarding address at a bank in Peking, they had no records.

  I wanted to find some evidence of a secret life, a careless friend, a sign of overt political activity. Every man is defined by his friends, and I began to draw up a picture of those to whom Hollis was close in those vital years in the late 1920s and 1930s. Two men in particular were of interest at Oxford - Claud Cockburn and Maurice Richardson. Both were left-wing: in Cockburn's case, when I ran a check on his file I noticed that Hollis had retained the file throughout the war, and never declared his friendship on the file as the Service customs demand. Did he, I wondered, have a reason to hide his relationship with Cockburn, a man with extensive Comintern contacts?

  Out in China there was a similar pattern. China was a hotbed of political activity in the 1930s, and was an active recruiting ground for the Comintern. Hugh Winterborn told me that an old retired colonel he had known in Japan knew Hollis while in China, having shared a flat with him for a year, and he made an appointment for me to visit him. Tony Stables was a brusque, old-fashioned military officer, and he remembered Hollis well. He said he never knew his political opinions, but always assumed they were left-wing because he mixed with people like Agnes Smedley, a left-wing journalist and Comintern talent spotter, as well as another man called Arthur Ewert, whom Stables described as an international socialist.

  The other person who was visited (by Arthur Martin) was Jane Sissmore. Jane Sissmore was responsible for bringing Hollis into MI5 before the war. She eventually transferred from MI5 to MI6, married an MI6 officer, and became Jane Archer. She was a formidable, intellectual woman who ran the old MI6 Communist Affairs research section. I often used to see her on D3 inquiries. She was always helpful, and told me the inquiries should have been embarked on years before. One afternoon I broached the subject of Mitchell and Hollis, who had both worked closely with her during the war. Jane was a wily old bird, and knew exactly why I was tapping her.

  "Could either be a spy, would you say?" I asked her.

  "They were both untrustworthy," she told me, "but if I had to choose the more likely candidate I would pick Roger."

  In November 1965 Hollis buzzed down to me and asked me to come up to his office. It was unlike him to be so informal. I had never before visited his office without being summoned by his secretary. He greeted me warmly by the door.

  '"Come over and sit down," he said, smiling broadly.

  He brushed imaginary dust off the sofa, and sat opposite me in the easy chair. That, too, was odd. Hollis usually sat in a straight-backed chair. Hollis was anxious to put the meeting on an informal footing. He made rather clumsy small talk about his imminent retirement.

  "Difficult time," he said, "the pension's not much, and every bit counts..."

  "What are your plans?"

  "Oh, down to the country I think. I have a little place down there. Get right away from it all. A bit of golf, a few walks... that kind of thing."

  He laughed in a gurgling sort of way.

  "Funny to think my picture will be up there in a few weeks' time," he said, looking up at the portraits which stared down at him. They were all such different-looking men: Kell's stiff military bearing; Petrie's detached pose; Sillitoe, the hunch-shouldered policeman; and Dick, with his easy charm and soft charisma.

  Hollis turned to face me, hunching forward, with his hands on his knees. He was smiling again, like a Cheshire cat.

  "Peter, there was just one thing I wanted to ask you before I go. I wanted to know why you think I'm a spy."

  I had to think very fast. If I told him a lie and he knew I had, I was out that day. So I told him the truth.

  Hollis made it sound so natural. Ever since he and I discussed Tisler nearly ten years before, we had been building for this confrontation. But now that it was out in the open, lying on the table between us like an inanimate object, words seemed so inadequate in the face of all the secretly nursed suspicions which had gone before.

  "It's all based on the old allegations, sir," I told him, "and the way things have been going wrong. You know my views on postwar failure. It's just a process of elimination. First it was Mitchell, and now it's you."

  "Oh yes - but surely you've been looking at new things...?"

  "Yes, the old allegations, sir."

  For an hour I went through the Volkov list, the retranslation, Gouzenko's Elli, the Skripkin report.

  "Well, Peter," he said, laughing gently, "you have got the manacles on me, haven't you...?"

  I began to interrupt. He held his hands face up to quiet me.

  "All I can say is that I am not a spy."

  "But is there anything definite, sir, anything I can put before the FLUENCY meeting, anything at all...?"

  "I can probably dig out the notes of the Gouzenko interrogation..." He sounded unsure. "I don't really recollect Skripkin, to be honest. And Volkov..."

  He drummed the edge of his seat with his sharpened pencil, and clicked his teeth.

  "I don't think you've got Volkov right. Why should Kim go all the way out to Turkey? He'd check first."

  He sighed, as if it was all too long ago.

  "It's useful, is it, the FLUENCY thing...?" he asked suddenly.

  "I think so, yes, sir. I think it's long overdue."

  "Yes, I rather thought you would think that... MacDonald isn't so sure - well, I suppose you know that."

  "He receives the reports, sir. I suppose he reads them."

  "Oh, yes, I'm sure we all read them," replied Hollis, "They make fascinating reading. All that history. Always good to blow a few cobwebs off the pipes."

  He smiled his Cheshire cat smile again.

  "Well, thank you for your frankness, Peter," he said, rising from his seat. "I must be getting on. Good to have this chat, though..."

  He strode stiffly back to his work. Like two actors we exited to different wings, our roles complete.

  I never saw Roger Hollis again. Within a few days the new Director-General, Martin Furnival Jones, was installed in the office. His first decision was to remove the photographs from the wall and place them in his ante-office.

  "Don't need an audience for the job," he muttered darkly when I asked why.

  F.J. was a man of few words, and he grew into the job. He was a determined man who believed he faced one major problem - the scale of the Soviet assault, in terms of numbers of Russian intelligence officers in London, relative to his own pitiful forces. His tenure as Director-General was marked by his campaign to expand MI5 and reduce Soviet diplomatic personnel. He had some success with the first, and eventually triumphed with the second.

  F.J.'s top priority was Russian counterespionage, and once he took over, the whole approach to the problem changed. Wh
ereas before I had to be persistent to get anything approved, with F.J. I could buzz him, go right up to see him, and get a decision there and then. He supported the D3 inquiries unreservedly, and sanctioned all the important interviews without question. He never shrank from making value judgments in cases like Watson and Proctor. If the evidence convinced him, he would act on it. F.J. was a man of few complexities. He was typical English gentleman on the surface, with a streak of toughness a mile wide just underneath. It made him few friends in Whitehall, but it was what the Service needed.

  Sadly for me, he appointed Anthony Simkins as his deputy. Simkins was probably the one man in MI5 whom I actively disliked, and the feeling was reciprocated in full measure. I knew I would have trouble as soon as he was appointed. Simkins was a lawyer. He and I had already had a major argument some years before, when he was Director-General of C Branch, where he had had some modest success. I was asked to chair an interdepartmental working party consisting of MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, and GCHQ to review technical security at the British Embassy in Moscow, following a fire in the radio room responsible for intercepting local Russian communications. It was clear from the investigation that not only had the Russians started the fire deliberately, but that they had had access to the radio room for some time. The Russians had been reading the radio receiver settings each night, thus they knew what we were intercepting. The Russians who cleaned the Embassy simply unscrewed the bolts (which were well oiled) on the security door lock and walked straight in.

  During the course of the inquiry I was also able to solve one other riddle from Volkov's list. Volkov claimed that the Russians could read the Foreign Office ciphers in Moscow. Maclean certainly betrayed every code he had access to in the Foreign Office, but Foreign Office records showed that the Moscow Embassy used one-time pads during and just after the war, so Maclean could not have been responsible.

  Remembering my work with "the Thing" in 1951, I was sure the Russians had been using a concealed microphone system, and we eventually found two microphones buried in the plaster above the cipher room. During the war, two clerks routinely handled the Embassy onetime pad communications, one reading over the clear text message for the other to encipher. The Russians simply recorded the clear text straight through their microphones. By the very good work of the Building Research Laboratory we were able to establish that the probable date of the concrete embedding of the microphone was about 1942, when the Embassy was in Kuibyshev.

  The Working Party Report found an extraordinary and persistent level of appalling security inside the Embassy, and every member of the committee endorsed a highly critical conclusion, which demanded the installation of an MI5 officer to work full-time in the Embassy on security. I circulated the trenchant report to F.J., who was then Deputy Director-General, and asked for his approval before I sent it to the Foreign Office. F.J. suggested I show it to Simkins as a courtesy, since he was Director C, responsible for Protective Security, and technically the Working Party covered his area. I sent Simkins a copy, and was surprised, a few hours later, to receive an angry summons to his office.

  "You can't possibly send anything like this to the Foreign Office," he said, is if I were suggesting sending inquisition implements as a gift to the Pope.

  "Why ever not?" I asked. "It's about time the bastards received a blasting. The whole place is a shambles!"

  '"Well, I'm sorry. It's the Foreign Office. It's a most important department of state, and you simply have no business sending them reports like this. I don't propose to approve it!"

  To my amazement, he defaced the report with a blue pencil. I took the report to F.J. and showed him what Simkins had. done. F.J. grunted, and told me to type it up and send it unchanged.

  "Bloody Foreign Office," he growled, "I've had the bloody lot of them..."

  The report was sent and a young MI5 officer, Tony Motion, was sent out to Moscow, but from then on I knew Simkins was an enemy for life.

  Shortly after F.J. took over as Director-General the FLUENCY Working Party submitted its first report to him and to Dick White, as chief of MI6. The report was in two sections. The first half listed each of the twenty-eight allegations which we were sure were true bills and investigatable but which could not be attributed to any known spy. The second half of the report contained the allegations written up as a narrative, starting with Gouzenko's Elli in 1942, and ending with Golitsin's information in 1962, to show the more or less continuous nature of the penetration. This report was submitted to both chiefs. But it was six months before the report was discussed again. Then we were told to resubmit our findings, listing only those allegations which we felt could be investigated, and giving the candidate who, in our judgment, best fitted the allegation.

  The FLUENCY Working Party decided that Gouzenko's Elli and Volkov's "Acting Head" should both be investigated, and that because of their closeness in time, they should be considered together. The candidate was typed neatly at the bottom of the page. Stripped of title, stripped of rank, it was just a name: Roger Hollis.

  The third allegation we included in our report was Goleniewski's "middling-grade agent," and it was potentially as damaging as the first two pointing toward Hollis. The "middling-grade agent" story began in November 1963. Goleniewski, Sniper as he was previously known, finally agreed to meet MI5 to clarify some of the details of the allegations he had made in anonymous letters from Poland. Previously Goleniewski was unwilling to meet anyone directly from MI5 because of our failure to catch Lambda 1, George Blake. But with Blake in jail, Goleniewski was seen by the head of the Polish section, who was himself half Polish by descent.

  By the time MI5 saw Goleniewski, the CIA suspected he was going clinically insane. He began to have delusions that he was descended from the Tsar, but despite that, his recall of intelligence remained remarkably accurate. One morning during the course of his interviews, Goleniewski announced that he had a story to tell which he had never told before. He said that he had not mentioned it before because the British had made such a mess of detecting Blake, but he knew there was a middling-grade agent inside MI5.

  Goleniewski said he knew about the middling-grade agent because he, a friend, and his former superior, had a serious discussion in the 1950s about whether to defect to the West. Deciding between Britain and the USA was difficult. All three agreed that Britain was the better place to live because of the large Polish emigre community, but MI6 was obviously impossible to approach because of Lambda 1. Goleniewski suggested to the other two that they try to contact MI5 through the emigre community in London, which he knew was monitored extensively by D Branch. Goleniewski's chief said that this plan was equally dangerous, since he knew the Russians also had a spy inside MI5.

  This spy had been recruited by the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB, responsible for the armed services. The Third Chief Directorate had been allowed to keep the agent because he was so important to them, and he was not transferred to the First Chief Directorate, which was the usual practice. The agent had served in the British Army, and held rank as a British officer when he was recruited. Goleniewski thought the recruitment had taken place in Eastern Europe, and named the Russian KGB colonel who had carried it out. The spy had provided the Russians with valuable Polish counterintelligence, probably because he worked in the Polish section of MI5.

  There was one other detail. In the mid-1950s the British successfully exfiltrated the Polish premier, Hanke, to the West. This had resulted in an inquiry in Warsaw, which General Serov, then head of the KGB, conducted himself. For some reason the KGB had failed to gain advance warning of the exfiltration, and Goleniewski learned that this was because the middling-grade agent was "on ice," either because he was under suspicion or because he was abroad and out of contact, or simply because his nerve was shaky. The spy was apparently perhaps on ice for two to three years before resuming work in the Polish section in the late 1950s. Later, when Goleniewski was in Moscow in 1959 he asked a friend in the Third Chief Directorate who was responsi
ble for recruiting the agent, and if the operation was still active. His friend expressed surprise that he even knew of the affair, and advised him to remain quiet.

  "This is a very dark affair," he said, "and I advise you to forget all about it."

  Goleniewski's allegation was extraordinarily detailed, but because of the overload in Counterintelligence from late 1963 onward, and because of the doubts about Goleniewski's credibility, the allegation was not investigated properly until FLUENCY began sitting. We divided the allegation up into its seven separate indicators, and allotted marks to every candidate who fulfilled each of the criteria. Eight people in MI5 partially fitted Goleniewski's middling-grade agent, but one fitted every single part of it exactly. His name was Michael Hanley, the Director of C Branch, and a man strongly tipped to become F.J.'s successor.