Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Solely because he was the proverbial "perfect fit," FLUENCY unanimously recommended that Hanley be investigated in connection with Goleniewski's allegation, and he was given the code name HARRIET.

  Another six months went by before the second FLUENCY report was finally discussed. Another meeting was called after hours in F.J.'s conference room, attended by me, Anne Orr-Ewing, Patrick Stewart, Evelyn McBarnet, Anthony Simkins, and F.J.. It was to be an entirely internal MI5 discussion as each of the three outstanding FLUENCY cases was an MI5 rather than an MI6 matter.

  It was the sort of meeting which began quietly. F.J. had a bottle of Scotch on the table. The lights cast dramatic shadows across the room. F.J. was striding up and down, his pipe clenched ferociously between his teeth.

  He spun around.

  "Do you really stand by these candidates?" he asked. "You realize the implications of what you are saying?"

  "Certainly I do," I said, shaken nevertheless by the force of his approach.

  "It's grotesque," he muttered, stabbing at the Hollis pages, "you can't expect me to accept that."

  He threw the report down onto the desk.

  "Where's this going to end, Peter - you've sent me a paper which says that my predecessor and most likely my successor are both spies. Have you thought it through? Have you stopped to think of the damage that will be done if we act on these recommendations? It will take a decade to recover from this, even if there's nothing at the end of it."

  "I stand by what we have written, F.J., and what's more, so does every other member of the FLUENCY Working Party, and I can assure you if there were other candidates, you would have had them."

  Simkins was sitting at the other end of the table. I could feel him chafing at the bit. He wanted to tear into me. But this was F.J.'s interrogation, and he wanted no distractions.

  "You've wanted this on the record for years - you and Arthur, haven't you? Have you any idea what this kind of thing did to Roger?"

  "I talked with him about it shortly before he left," I told F.J.. "He was quite calm about it."

  F.J. was taken aback as I described my last confrontation with Hollis.

  "He must have been a tough man," he said grimly.

  Finally, Simkins saw his chance.

  "It's simply outrageous," he spat in a shrill voice, his public-school vowels stretching to breaking point, "everyone knows you and Martin had it in for Roger. You go around criticizing the Foreign Office, this person, that person, and then you let fly with accusations, spreading rumors, spreading poison. It's so undisciplined. If there is a criticism of Roger, it's that he let you go too far."

  "All I want is the truth, Anthony," I said, trying with difficulty to maintain civility.

  "Truth! You don't know the meaning of it. You need a bit of respect! It's scandalous! The man has scarcely set foot outside the office and you blackguard his name and reputation, a man with thirty years' service in the office, who did more for the place than you will ever do."

  Luckily, Patrick Stewart rallied back on my behalf.

  "It's all very well, Anthony, to sound off, but you've only just come into this."

  He gripped the sides of his wheelchair, his knuckles turning white.

  "Some of us have been struggling with this problem for years. It's not easy. It's not pleasant, but we all felt that it had to be done, and the least we expect when we have completed a report as difficult as this is a little rational debate."

  But Simkins was determined to press on.

  "What about America - you spread the poison out there too. When I was out there all they wanted to discuss was bloody penetration. It's intolerable. We'll be made the laughingstock of the world."

  "And you don't think we are when Philby goes or Blunt confesses..." I shot back.

  F.J. chewed his pipe energetically, occasionally pausing to light it with a match, almost as if he were not listening to the row ebbing and flowing. Then after half an hour he suddenly interrupted.

  "Right, here's my decision. I am sure you will agree Peter, that we have to solve the middling-grade agent as the top priority. He's still in here if he exists."

  I nodded.

  "Well, I want Hanley looked at." He slapped the page with the back of his hand. "He's such a perfect fit, and the Americans know all about the allegation. But I want the others who score highly looked at as well... I want it run down to the ends of the earth, and then we'll tell the Americans. As for the other" - he was glaring at me now - "I won't change my view, it's grotesque..."

  F.J. dismissed the meeting, and everyone trooped out, leaving him alone with the cares of office on his shoulders. He was the Pope, trying to reconcile a divided Church.

  - 20 -

  Hanley was a huge, florid man, with an outwardly bullying manner, which concealed a shy man underneath. Ever since his promotion as Director C in 1960, he was seen as a potential Director-General. He was the right age, mid-forties, with a supple civil servant's mind, which endeared him to Whitehall, and a brusque military exterior which made him popular with the board at M15. By the time the HARRIET investigation emerged he was the crown prince - certain to succeed F.J. when he retired in the early 1970s.

  It is always distressing to pursue an investigation into a colleague. With Hollis and Mitchell it was different. They were distant figures, close to retirement by the time the suspicions against them hardened. But Hanley and I knew each other well. We were contemporaries, and although by no stretch of the imagination friends, we had served together amicably on committees for over ten years. His career lay in front of him, and his future was in my hands.

  Patrick Stewart, the D1 (Investigations), and I handled the investigation jointly. The first task was to provide a complete picture of Hanley's life. We started backtracking through his family background, his entry into the Service, and his subsequent career. Dozens of people who knew him were interviewed, all under the guise of a routine positive vet.

  The most difficult aspect of all in the HARRIET affair was that the investigation soon revealed that Hanley had had a most distressing childhood following the breakup of his parents' marriage. He was left with deep-seated feelings of inferiority, which, according to his record of service, required psychiatric treatment in the 1950s, when he was a young MI5 officer, a fact which Hanley made known to the office at the time.

  That Hanley had visited a psychiatrist was not in itself unusual. Many senior officers in MI5 had counseling of one form or another during their careers to assist them in carrying the burdens of secrecy. But inevitably our investigation had to probe Hanley's old wounds, in case they revealed a motive for espionage. F.J., Patrick Stewart, and I discussed the problem, and F.J. wrote a personal letter to Hanley's psychiatrist asking him to lift the oath of confidentiality. I visited the psychiatrist in Harley Street. He knew Hanley's occupation, and showed no hesitation in pronouncing Hanley a determined, robust character who had learned to live with his early disabilities. I asked him if he could ever conceive of him as a spy.

  "Absolutely not!" he replied with total conviction.

  Neither was there any hint of espionage in Hanley's early life. At Oxford before the war he was the model of the sensible, mildly left-wing student. When war came he stayed at Oxford for a year to get his degree and then joined a searchlight regiment in Home Defense as a subaltern, and remained there until 1945. It was important work, but not remotely adequate for someone of Hanley's considerable intellectual gifts. But everyone who knew him at this time remarked on his nagging sense of inferiority, and the consequent lack of ambition.

  The first point in his life which aroused our interest was his decision, in 1945, to enroll for a crash course in the Russian language at the Joint Services Language School at Cambridge, which both our own operations and Golitsin had told us was a recruiting ground for the KGB (but there was not the slightest evidence from our sources that Hanley had been involved with them). The Russian language course was the first time Hanley came into contact with Russians, an
d from then on his career seemed an uncanny fit for Goleniewski's allegations. After service in Budapest, where he served on the Joint Allied Intelligence Committee with the KGB officer named by Goleniewski as having made the recruitment of the middling-grade agent, Hanley returned to London. He became the War Office liaison officer with the Soviet military attache, and dealt mainly with returnee problems. During this time he began to have dealings with MI5, and when he was demobilized in the late 1940s, he applied for a full-time post, and joined as a research officer on Russian Affairs. His first task was the compilation of the index of agents of the Rote Kapelle which decades later I was to find so invaluable in my D3 work.

  Within two years Hanley shifted to the Polish desk (D2) and his career took off. First he went to Hong Kong for two and a half years and then returned to E Branch (Colonial Affairs) before becoming head of D2, and in 1960 a member of the Board as Director C. It was a career with ever-increasing momentum, yet his background presented a possible espionage profile. Here was a man from a troubled childhood, with deep-seated feelings of insecurity, who comes into continuous contact with Russians at a delicate time of his life, when he is beginning for the first time to emerge from his shell. Perhaps, like Blake, he had a chip on his shoulder, and the Russians had played skillfully on his concealed feelings of resentment until they fanned into treachery.

  The problem was that neither Patrick nor I believed it, despite the fact that on paper the surface fit with Goleniewski's allegation was so precise. It was the exact reverse of the case with Hollis, where we were both instinctively convinced of the case against him, even though on paper the connections looked far weaker.

  As far as Hanley was concerned, too much weighed against the "chip on the shoulder" theory. From the start of his career in MI5, Hanley had been marked out as a flyer. He was valued by both his peers and his superiors, despite his often hectoring manner. He had married into the office, and enjoyed a close and devoted relationship with his wife. And lastly there was the evidence of the psychiatrist.

  Espionage is a crime almost devoid of evidence, which is why intuition, for better or worse, always has a large part to play in its successful detection. All a counterespionage officer usually has when he confronts his suspect is a background, a trail, a set of coincidences which are open to a variety of interpretations but which, as Dick White used to say, lead to the epiphany - that moment when all the facts add up to only one conclusion. But with Hanley, the trail led one way, and intuition another. The only possible way to resolve the case was through interrogation, and when we submitted the papers to F.J. he agreed.

  Mention interrogations, and most people imagine grueling sessions under blazing lamps: men in shirt-sleeves wearing down a sleep-deprived suspect with aggressive questioning until finally he collapses sobbing on the floor, admitting the truth. The reality is much more prosaic. MI5 interrogations are orderly affairs, usually conducted between 9:30 A.M. and 5 P. M. with a break for lunch.

  So why do so many spies confess? The secret is to achieve superiority over the man sitting across the table. This was the secret of Skardon's success as an interrogator. Although we mocked him years later for his willingness to clear suspects we subsequently learned to have been spies, he was genuinely feared by Blunt and other members of the Ring of Five. But his superiority in the interrogation room was not based on intellect or physique. Mainly, of course, it was the devastating briefs provided for him by Arthur Martin and Evelyn McBarnet which convinced men like Fuchs that Skardon knew them better than they knew themselves. It was not only the briefs that helped Skardon but also the skill of the eavesdroppers. In the Fuchs case, Skardon was convinced that he was innocent until they pointed out where Fuchs had lied. This information enabled Skardon to break him. But Skardon himself played an important role too. He epitomized, in his manner, the world of sensible English middle-class values - tea in the afternoon and lace curtains - so much so that it was impossible for those he interrogated to ever see him as the embodiment of capitalist iniquity, and thus they were thrown off balance from the very start.

  But none of this stood a chance against Hanley if he was a spy. He was an insider. He knew all the tricks too well. Like Philby, he would see the punches coming. The only way to proceed with a professional is to put him through an extremely thorough vet. A complete curriculum vitae of the suspect's life and career is drawn up, and he is taken through it in interrogation. If there are any deviations, omissions, or inaccuracies, these are then probed. If the suspect is guilty the pressure can often lead to further inaccuracies, until his secret life begins to unravel.

  The MI5 technique is an imperfect system. But like trial by jury, it is the best yet devised. It has the virtue of enabling a man, if he has nothing to hide, and has the resilience to bear the strain, to clear himself. But its disadvantage is that hidden blemishes on an innocent man's record can often come to the surface during intensive investigation and render continued service impossible. It is a little like medieval justice: sometimes innocence can be proved only at the cost of a career.

  F.J. elected to conduct Hanley's interrogation himself. He knew it would be a difficult encounter and that in the end Hanley's fate would rest in his own hands, and he felt it unfair to entrust the task to any other officer. But he ensured that Patrick and I monitored the entire interrogation from the Dl operations room in Leconfield House.

  Hanley was summoned into F.J.'s office one morning, and informed that an allegation had been made, and that he was required to submit himself immediately for interrogation. The interrogation took place in the Director-General's office, with an overt microphone on the table. It was recorded in the room where Patrick and I were monitoring the interrogation. Throughout the first day F.J. took Hanley through his life. Hanley was scrupulously honest, sometimes painfully so. He ducked no questions, hid no details of his life or his inner feelings. On the second day he was given the details of Goleniewski's allegation. He was not shaken in any way. He agreed that he was a perfect fit, but calmly stated that he was not a spy, had never been, and had never at any stage been approached by a Russian or anyone else, although at least once a week in Budapest he had met the Russian officer who was alleged to have made the approach.

  Hanley's interrogation proved that while secret service is a profession of deceit and intrigue, many of its practitioners are men of exceptional character. Here was a proud man, who cherished his achievements, and those that he felt might be his to come. One morning he is invited to undergo a trial by ordeal and is stripped apart, year by year, until his soul is bare. All the while he knows that faceless colleagues have dogged his every step, listening at home, listening at the office, listening now. The strain must have been more than most men could bear. No one listening could doubt for one moment that this was an honest man. Hanley was tough, and he showed the system could work. He walked through the fire and emerged unscathed.

  That night F.J., Patrick Stewart, and I went to my club, the Oxford and Cambridge, to discuss the interrogation. F.J. settled down into a corner with a large Scotch. His eyes were pinched, as they always were when he was stressed.

  "Are you satisfied?" he asked dully.

  "He's in the clear," I agreed.

  Patrick nodded silently.

  "You'll inform FLUENCY, of course...?" said F. J..

  At that moment Hanley himself walked in unexpectedly. He and I shared the same club, and occasionally ran into each other, but I never expected he would come there so soon after his ordeal. We were in a quiet corner, and he walked past without noticing us, dragging his feet slightly, as if in shock. His normally florid face was white as a sheet.

  After the HARRIET investigation was closed down, F.J. asked me to visit the CIA and inform them that MI5 considered Hanley cleared of the Goleniewski allegations. It was a job of enormous sensitivity. The CIA were already up in arms over the Mitchell and Hollis cases, and were themselves well aware of Goleniewski's allegations, and the fact that Hanley was a near-perfect fit. It
was essential for the preservation of the alliance that they be left in no doubt about the veracity of our conclusion.

  F.J. did not get on with Americans particularly well, and preferred to leave dealings to Michael McCaul and me. Partly it was antipathy toward Angleton, and partly it was residual upper-middle-class anti-Americanism. Dick White had something of the same prejudice. Neither was a wealthy man, while Helms and Angleton rarely hid the fact that they were paid handsomely for similar duties.

  Both men had reason to distrust the Americans deep down. F.J. never forgave Helms and Angleton for the Gray and Coyne affair, while Dick had clashed repeatedly with the American military hierarchy when he controlled Counterintelligence in Europe at the end of the war, and was never forgiven. In 1953, when Sillitoe retired, the Americans stupidly tried to block his appointment as Director-General.

  There was, in the end, a fundamental difference in approach. Both F.J. and Dick saw themselves as servants of the Crown, and their services as part of the orderly, timeless configuration of Whitehall. They were insiders, whereas Helms, Angleton, and Hoover were all outsiders. There was a streak of ruthlessness and lawlessness about the American intelligence community which disturbed many in the senior echelons of British Intelligence. They feared a future calamity, and wanted to keep their distance, so inevitably the weight of liaison often fell on the shoulders of officers like me.