Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  This is what had happened. Colin Coote (later Sir), then editor of the Daily Telegraph, had learned that there was an important defector in Britain and, being determined to run the story, demanded to know his name. He happened to meet Lord Home, the Foreign Secretary, and, later, the Foreign Office was instructed to put pressure on MI5 so that Coote could be given the name. The MI5 officers handling this defector, probably the most valuable ever, were loath to name him at all because he was so fearful of being assassinated by his former KGB colleagues. To those few in MI5 who knew of his existence, he was known only by the codeword ‘Kago’. With both Hollis and Mitchell under suspicion of being in regular touch with the KGB, it was essential that they should not be told his real name or of his presence in Britain.

  The MI5 chiefs were anxious to comply with the Foreign Office request because it appeared to have come from the Foreign Secretary. So, in some desperation, the men in charge of Golitsin falsified his name to something they could eventually claim, however lamely, had been a slip of the tongue. They chose Anatoli Dolnytsin because a Soviet diplomat of that name had once served in London. This name was passed to Mitchell, who arranged for it to be given to Coote through the proper channel – the D-Notice Committee, which then served as the link between MI5 and the media.

  The MI5 officers, however, were determined to get some revenge on Coote for forcing the issue, which they regarded as dangerous. He wanted the name exclusively, so Col. Sammy Lohan, the D-Notice secretary, was instructed to put out the name over the agency tapes so that every newspaper got it, thereby depriving the Telegraph of its scoop.

  The officers’ fears had been fully justified. The day that the name ‘Dolnytsin’ appeared in the newspapers, Golitsin packed his bags and returned to the United States on the next aircraft. Furthermore, he refused to return for several years, which meant that MI5 men had to fly over to see him and, for a long time, were denied the continuous interrogation they needed to extract the 2,000 worldwide leads the defector eventually provided.

  After patient surveillance, the only clue of any substance that was found against Mitchell was a torn-up map in his wastebasket suggesting some rendezvous, which was later satisfactorily accounted for. The team decided that they still wanted to interrogate him, especially as he was soon to retire. Hollis then told them that he had been to see the Prime Minister to secure permission for the interrogation, which he did not need to do, and that this had been refused because Macmillan thought that Mitchell might then defect, with dreadful political consequences, especially regarding Anglo–American relations on the exchange of secrets. The MI5 officers believed that Hollis was lying, and Macmillan remembers so little about him, while recalling the Mitchell case in detail, that they might have been right. Whatever the truth, Hollis’s statement triggered off the most extraordinary event.

  Hollis was told that, whether Mitchell was interrogated or not, the suspicion against him was so strong that the CIA and the FBI would have to be warned of it because of the damage he might have done to them. At first, Hollis insisted that the Americans should not be informed, but when he was told that Sir Dick White would then have to tell the Prime Minister about this strange decision, which would breach the Anglo–American agreement on security, he produced a bombshell. ‘Right, I’ll go and tell them myself,’ he announced.

  Normally, an MI5 case officer with full knowledge of the details would have been sent over to consult with CIA and FBI men at his own level. By insisting on going on his own, Hollis automatically raised what was a thin case to the highest political level. This danger was pointed out to him but with no effect. Neither was he caring of the fact that Lord Denning was in the middle of his inquiry into the Profumo affair, in which Hollis was deeply, and peculiarly, involved.

  On arrival in Washington, Hollis went to see J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. ‘I have come to tell you that I have reason to suspect that one of my most senior officers, Graham Mitchell, has been a long-term agent of the Soviet Union.’ He then drove to the CIA headquarters at Langley, outside Washington, and gave the same message personally to the fiercely anti-Soviet chief, John McCone, in the presence of James Angleton, then the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence. The Americans disbelieved him, especially when he was unable to provide the details requested by their aides. Hollis also took the unusual step – deprecated by McCone – of explaining his mission to the British ambassador, Lord Harlech. Harlech has no recollection of the meeting but told me that so much was happening at the time and that visits by intelligence chiefs were so frequent that he may have taken little notice of it.

  Hollis returned to London in some anger and demanded an independent inquiry under another official of his choice. His objective was not only to clear Mitchell but to undermine any suspicion that MI5 had been penetrated at all, a motive he did not conceal from his officers. Mitchell was temporarily cleared, but, in spite of further opposition from Hollis, Sir Dick White agreed that a fuller and more wide-ranging inquiry into all the aspects of penetration was essential. As White was senior, Hollis deferred to him, and a permanent joint MI5–secret service committee was set up in November 1964 to examine all the suspected penetrations of both services in the greatest possible depth. For want of a better name, it was called the Fluency Committee. There were three members from MI5, including Arthur Martin, three from the secret service, including Stephen de Mowbray, a particularly ardent and able young man, plus a chairman. Such was its objectives’ urgency that it met every fortnight.

  To dispose of Mitchell, at this point, he retired at his own request, somewhat short of sixty, the normal retiring age from MI5. Harold Macmillan believed that he had simply become unbalanced through being so many years in undercover work. He told Sir Dick White that ten years in it was enough for any man, while fifteen should be the maximum. Mitchell had served more than twenty.

  At the end of 1967, by which time Hollis had retired from MI5 and been replaced by Sir Martin Furnival Jones, Mitchell was brought to London for the interrogation that was so overdue. He had no difficulty in answering every question. He explained that he had always taken precautions against being followed as a routine part of his job. So far as his miserable demeanour was concerned, he said it was entirely the result of trying to work with Hollis, who refused to delegate work to him so that he had far too little to do. He would not admit that he suspected Hollis, but those who interrogated him think that this might have been at the root of his anxiety.

  He had a simple and checkable explanation for the torn-up map and convinced his questioners that he knew nothing about the locked drawer in the antique desk, which later proved to have different significance.

  The MI5 conclusion that Mitchell was clean was fully endorsed by Lord Trend when he studied the evidence along with that against Hollis. Nevertheless, for four years, there had been deep suspicion that the two most senior officers of the organisation set up to catch spies had been spies themselves. And, as I shortly relate, for a brief time there was a third senior officer suspect enough to be thoroughly investigated and interrogated.

  The confusion and despair at the middle levels as one counterespionage operation after another went sour can be imagined. Everything possible was done to conceal the suspicions from as many of the staff as possible, but internal leaks in such a small organisation were inevitable, and those specially trained to be alert to suspicious circumstances soon realised that something serious was amiss.

  The interrogation of Mitchell had been almost routine to eliminate him from the inquiries because evidence of Soviet penetration continued to accrue after he had left MI5. On occasion, the Soviet intelligence officers were almost contemptuously impudent in the way they forced MI5 to waste time and money in following up bogus leads. Flats and houses were rented to watch spies who never appeared or, more likely, never existed. In one instance, a suitcase containing an old radio transmitter was deposited in a left luggage office. Counter-espionage men were tipped off about it and set a long watch but nobody
ever collected it.

  The behaviour of Hollis during the confession and continuing interrogation of Anthony Blunt in the spring and summer of 1964 helped to intensify the suspicion against him. The case officer who induced Blunt to confess happened to be the man who first suspected Hollis and was a prominent member of the Fluency Committee investigating the Soviet penetrations. This was Arthur Martin, who had been involved in interrogating Philby, not Jim Skardon, as has been reported. Hollis forced a row with him when he had barely begun to interrogate Blunt and suspended him from duty for a fortnight. Martin offered to carry on with the questioning of Blunt from his home, but Hollis forbade it. As a result, Blunt was left alone for two weeks, and nobody knows what he did, although the security authorities had their suspicions, as I shall describe.

  Soon afterward, Hollis picked another quarrel with Martin, and, though he was very senior, summarily sacked him. Martin believes that Hollis sacked him because he feared him, but the action did Hollis little good, whatever his motive. Martin’s reputation was so high that he was snapped up by the secret service and, to Hollis’s mortification, remained on the Fluency Committee investigating the leakages.

  While the members of the investigating committee worked as quickly as their routine daily tasks permitted, Hollis reached the retirement age of sixty in December 1965. There is no truth in rumours that he was forced to retire early because of his handling of the Profumo case or for any other reason. Nor was Hollis ‘roasted’ by Macmillan for his failure to provide adequate warning of the international implications of the Profumo affair, as Macmillan himself has recently assured me.

  The mistaken belief that Hollis was prematurely retired may have been given extra credence by the attempt by Harold Wilson, who had by this time become Prime Minister, to bring in a policeman, Sir Eric St Johnston, as the new director general of MI5. The reason for this was that Sir Eric, then chief constable of Lancashire, had been friendly with Wilson, who held a Lancashire seat and thought a change might be salutary. Wilson was strongly opposed in this by George Wigg, the security overlord who eventually secured the appointment of Hollis’s professional deputy, Martin Furnival Jones. Lord Wigg, as he now is, has assured me that he knew nothing of the suspicions against Hollis. Neither did Harold Wilson at that time.

  Shortly before Hollis retired to Somerset, he called in one of the members of the investigating committee and staggered him by asking, ‘Tell me, why do you think I am a spy?’

  After swallowing hard, the officer gave his reasons and asked, ‘Do you dispute these undoubted facts?’

  Hollis shrugged and said, ‘All I can say is that I am not a spy.’

  ‘But is there any evidence you can produce to swing the balance your way?’ persisted the officer, warming to his opportunity.

  ‘No,’ said Hollis. ‘You think you have the manacles on me, don’t you?’ he added with a derisive smile.

  CHAPTER 4

  A MISTAKE IN A SHOPPING LIST

  AS SOON AS Martin Furnival Jones was fully installed as director general of MI5 at the beginning of 1966, the Fluency Committee produced a catalogue of 200 examples of Soviet bloc penetrations of MI5 and the secret service, with assessments about each of them. It made certain recommendations, including the interrogation both of Hollis and of Mitchell, mainly with the purpose of closing the file on the latter, as I have already explained. Interest in Mitchell had been enhanced, to some extent, when Col. T. A. Robertson, a former much-respected member of MI5, happened to mention that, when Mitchell had been discussing with him his forthcoming retirement, he had remarked that he would have more time to ‘play around with his wireless sets’. Apparently, nobody in MI5 had known that Mitchell was a radio enthusiast, a common device adopted by spies who transmit their information that way. The situation was so desperate that no straw in the wind could be ignored.

  The committee also recommended the interrogation of a defence scientist, indicated through a lead inadvertently given after 1964 by Anthony Blunt as possibly the Fifth Man of the Ring of Five. (This was not Dr Basil Mann, the British atomic scientist living in the United States, who has previously been named but against whom MI5 has never entertained suspicion.)

  No action was taken on any of these recommendations for nine months, after which it was found that they had never reached Furnival Jones, having been shelved somewhere at a lower level. Understandably, it is not easy for even a loyal officer to believe that the colleague who sat at the desk next door is a traitor, and it is even more difficult to credit that a long-serving director general was a spy. Still, this long delay was censured by Lord Trend in his eventual inquiry.

  Once Furnival Jones saw the catalogue of penetrations, he ordered immediate action in certain directions, including interrogation of the suspected Fifth Man, as I shall relate in detail later. He refused to sanction the interrogation of his old chief Hollis unless the evidence could be strengthened.

  Furnival Jones did, however, agree to the interrogation of a very senior officer, still serving, who happened to fit a description given by a defector, whose information had up till then proved fully reliable. This was such a sensitive operation, as the suspect was in line to be a possible director general, that he was given the codename ‘Harriet’ in the hope of concealing the situation from his subordinates. ‘Harriet’ was fully cooperative, accounting during lengthy interrogations for every relevant part of his past life, including his entry into MI5, and he was fully cleared by the end of 1967.

  Inquiries by the Fluency Committee into the origin of the defector’s information suggested that it might have been a KGB plant. In that case, the KGB would have needed personal details about the officer being framed so that it could concoct the disinformation to fit him. It was noted that Hollis was one of only two officials with access to ‘Harriet’s’ personal file.

  It is not unknown for genuine defectors to switch back to working for their former side because their relatives back home are being threatened or for money or even because of a change of heart. For this reason, they are always somewhat suspect unless their information continues to be accurate. As a former intelligence officer explained his attitude to defectors to me, ‘Only by their fruits ye shall know them.’

  The Fluency Committee renewed their efforts in Hollis’s direction. One of their first steps was a re-examination of the so-called ‘shopping list’, which had been handed in to British intelligence by a would-be Russian defector, Konstantin Volkov, in August 1945. Volkov had walked into the British consulate in Istanbul on a beautiful summer afternoon and asked to see an official called John Read, who spoke Russian, having served in Moscow. Mr Read has given me a first-hand account of the incident.

  Believing, apparently, that Read was in charge of the ‘anti-Soviet bureau’, Volkov said that he was a senior KGB officer and that he and his wife wished to defect to Britain. He claimed to be of particular interest to the security authorities there because he had been employed for several years in the British department of the KGB headquarters in Moscow. He said that he had deposited documents in a suitcase in a flat in Moscow and would provide the address and a key if the United Kingdom could arrange for his safe defection and the odd figure of £27,000 – probably a conversion of some round sum in roubles – in cash. He insisted that no communication should be made with London by radio because the Russians could read the Foreign Office cyphers.

  Read asked him to put his offer in writing, and a couple of days later Volkov returned with a typewritten document in Russian. Read sat up most of the night translating it into English. The document offered many things, including details of the current organisation of the KGB and the identities of hundreds of its officers serving abroad.

  The crucial clause in the document read:

  Files and documents concerning very important Soviet agents in important establishments in London. Judging by the cryptonyms [the codenames in KGB cables between London and Moscow], there are at present seven such agents, five in British intelligence and tw
o in the Foreign Office. I know, for instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the duties of Head of a Department of British Counter-Intelligence.

  • • •

  With some excitement, Read reported the incident to the British ambassador, the late Sir Maurice Peterson, who had a deep-seated prejudice against the secret service, objecting to having to house any of its representatives under diplomatic cover. He declined to take any interest in Volkov’s offer, telling Read that the Russian’s information was probably unreliable. As a result the information and the translation were passed to secret service headquarters in London at a relatively low level and the ‘shopping list’ crossed the desk of Kim Philby. He immediately identified the agent fulfilling the duties of head of a Department of British Counter-Intelligence as himself. As he later confessed, he alerted his Russian controller in London, and Volkov was seized and removed from Istanbul to Moscow strapped to a stretcher. Nothing further was done about the other hints in the ‘shopping list’.

  The information that the British diplomatic cyphers were known to the Russians was ignored, though, as events proved, Donald Maclean had continually compromised them, especially during his service in the British embassy in Washington.

  To give the Russians time to deal with Volkov, Philby had delayed his arrival in Istanbul to ‘deal’ with the defector for more than a fortnight. When Read asked him why he had moved so slowly, Philby shrugged and said, ‘It was a question of leave [vacation] arrangements.’

  With remarkable perspicacity the Fluency Committee decided that before the whole shopping list was investigated it should be translated again by an expert who had been concerned with decoding KGB traffic at the time and knew the jargon in use then. The expert translated the item which seemed to refer to Philby quite differently. The new translation read, I know, for instance, that one of these agents was acting head of a Department of the British Counter-Intelligence directorate. This could only mean MI5 – not the secret service, where Philby had been.