Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  Hollis’s arrival in China was an expression of the dogged determination that was to characterise him throughout his life. Even his friends agree that he was not particularly talented. The MI5 backtrack revealed that in Shanghai Hollis became friendly with Agnes Smedley, an American left-wing journalist prominent in the English-speaking community there. Miss Smedley, who was officially a correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, was then in her mid-thirties, had spent some time in Moscow and had entered China on a forged American passport. There is no doubt that she was a dedicated agent of the Comintern, promoting world revolution, and was deeply involved with several Soviet spy rings in Shanghai, which, at that time, was a major centre of the Comintern conspiracy.

  One of these rings was created and run by Richard Sorge, a German who was a professional spy for the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army, first in China and then, with spectacular success, in Japan. Sorge’s assignment in Shanghai was to set up a spy ring for operations inside China, but he also managed to recruit two of the most important members of his Japanese group there. In his memoirs, written shortly before he was hanged in Tokyo, Sorge recorded how Smedley had helped him by introducing friends, whom he was able to recruit, and allowing him to use her house as a rendezvous. Hollis was in Shanghai when communists were being butchered by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, and his resentment at this as a young man might have facilitated his recruitment in the Comintern, as it certainly did with others, because Soviet intelligence was making a major effort to exploit the circumstances.

  Sorge is also believed to have recruited a young German communist of Slav origin who arrived in Shanghai as the wife of an architect. This woman, who later received intelligence training in Moscow and became a most productive Soviet agent, winning two Orders of the Red Banner, was none other than Ursula Beurton, whose real name was Ruth Kuczynski. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, she was to become a Soviet espionage courier in Britain during the Second World War and moved to Oxford just as Hollis arrived there with his evacuated section of MI5.

  Before going to China, Beurton and her German husband had worked for the Red Army in Poland. By 1940, he was imprisoned by the Chinese for espionage activities, and his wife, then well established in Switzerland, decided to divorce him. Her purpose in doing this was to secure British nationality before moving on to Britain. On securing a divorce, she immediately married a British member of her Swiss spy ring and thereby secured the passport that enabled her to enter Britain, which she did with little delay, travelling via neutral Lisbon.

  Richard Sorge left Shanghai for Moscow in 1932 before proceeding to Tokyo. It is not known whether Hollis met him, but he may well have done so because the European community in Shanghai was small and close socially. Miss Smedley herself was an active recruiter of Soviet intelligence agents for the Red Army. It is known that the spy ‘Elli’, who may have been Hollis, worked first for Soviet military intelligence (GRU), probably before being taken over by the KGB, which usually acquires control of the most important spies.

  According to the CIA investigations into Hollis’s background, there was also a ‘particularly brutal’ Soviet recruiter active in Shanghai at the time, and Hollis knew him. The ‘brutality’ referred to the ruthlessness with which the Russian used bribery, women and blackmail to secure agents. Hollis was certainly susceptible to sexual indulgence and developed a notable reputation as a ladies’ man and a retailer of risqué stories. (It is almost certainly coincidental, however, that in the MI5 booklet Their Trade is Treachery, prepared while Hollis was director general, one of the Six Easy Lessons on How to Become a Spy is ‘Develop a few vices, especially abroad, so that with luck you can be compromised and blackmailed.’)

  The investigators found that Hollis had been very hard up in China, where he also eventually worked in Peking, Hangkow and Dairen. The recruitment of a young employee of a tobacco company would seem to make little sense, but, as the history of the Ring of Five so clearly demonstrates, Soviet intelligence believes in backing long shots that it can control and then push into positions of trust.

  After about nine years’ service in China, Hollis contracted tuberculosis and was sent by BAT to Switzerland for treatment. On the way, he travelled over the Trans-Siberian railway from Vladivostock and spent a little time in Russia. This could just conceivably account for a statement by Gouzenko, the GRU defector, that there was ‘something Russian in “Ellis”’s background’, though a relationship with the White Russian communities in the Chinese cities where Hollis worked would be a more credible allusion.

  It could be coincidence that Hollis and Beurton were in Shanghai and Oxford at the same time; or they might both have been recruited in China and brought together in Oxford in the Soviet interest.

  It is perhaps an even stranger coincidence that Hollis and Beurton should also have been contemporaries in Switzerland, while Hollis was there for treatment. Beurton lived in the Montreux area, but I have been unable to discover where Hollis was located. If Beurton recruited Hollis to the Soviet cause, it could have been accomplished in Switzerland, though the Fluency Committee regarded China as more likely.

  The Swiss treatment was successful, but BAT regarded Hollis’s health as too delicate for further employment, and he left the company. Though surprisingly athletic, he was to retain the look of someone who had had tuberculous and he became progressively so round-shouldered that he looked almost hunched.

  At the beginning of 1936 Hollis was basically a broken man. He had no degree, his health was suspect and his experience in China was not likely to be helpful in securing a post in England. The only work he could find was as a clerk typist. Nevertheless, he was still able to afford to play a lot of golf, at which he was a devastatingly consistent performer, with a single-figure handicap, having secured a half blue at Oxford. He was also a good tennis player.

  Through his tennis connections, Hollis met an army major and told him that he was keen to get a job in MI5. This in itself was odd because he had no special qualifications for the work. But, when Soviet intelligence secures a promising recruit, he or she is urged to get a job in MI5, the secret service, Government Communication Headquarters (the radio-interception organisation), The Times, the BBC, the Foreign Office, or the Home Office – in that order of preference. On the major’s recommendation, Hollis was interviewed by an MI5 board, which rejected him but suggested that, with his foreign experience, he should try the secret service.

  CHAPTER 6

  ENTRY WITH INTENT?

  WHEN HOLLIS DULY made his application, the secret service carried out its own inquiries and turned him down, ostensibly on the grounds that his health was not reliable enough for service abroad. Because of this, there must have been a secret service file on Hollis, but this was destroyed at some later stage. It may be that a known major spy, so far completely concealed from the public but whom I shall identify later, was employed on ‘weeding’ files for the secret service – removing documents no longer considered of use – and thus destroyed the record on Hollis.

  In spite of these rebuffs, which would have deterred most normal candidates, Hollis persisted in his efforts to join MI5, and eventually, at a tennis party where he may have contrived an entry, he met Jane Sissmore, a woman officer of MI5. This woman, later called Jane Archer, was highly regarded in MI5, especially as an interrogator. On her say-so, therefore, Hollis was taken on the MI5 strength in 1936 with the understanding that he would work as her assistant.

  There is no suggestion that Miss Sissmore took Hollis into MI5 for any other reason than that she believed he would be useful there when, with war in the offing, the organisation needed to expand. His meeting with her may have been coincidental, or he may have been directed toward her by someone who knew her position, for in those days MI5 officers kept the nature of their employment secret. The director general at the time of Hollis’s recruitment was the legendary Maj. Gen. Sir Vernon Kell, who had held command, with unchallenged integrity, from the inception of MI5 in 1909. Presumably
, he approved of the recruitment, but at that time there was no positive vetting of candidates with a search into background and connections. The fact that Hollis’s father was a bishop would be, in all probability, sufficient evidence of his loyalty.

  Having engineered his entry into MI5, Hollis was to remain there for twenty-nine years without a break, almost always at headquarters and without experience as a field agent, though paying many liaison visits abroad. Eventually, more through time serving than outstanding aptitude, he occupied the post of deputy director general for three years and then, for nine years, the top position itself.

  As assistant to Jane Sissmore, he was involved with those departments of MI5 responsible for overseeing Soviet and communist operations in the United Kingdom and colonies. This meant that he had daily access to all known information about the activities of Russian espionage, subversion and sabotage agents. He also knew of the MI5 efforts to penetrate the British Communist Party and to monitor the activities of British communists who might be assisting Soviet bloc agents.

  The backtrack into the MI5 penetration produced one important item that might have implicated Hollis. For five years, in the late ’30s, British intelligence had been successfully decoding the Russian radio traffic to its Comintern agents in Europe. MI5 had access to the results, which were most useful, but suddenly the radio traffic ceased, the last message being an announcement that other means would have to be used for communication. This disappointing event occurred around 1938, after Hollis had arrived at MI5 but before Blunt joined.

  Late in 1940, Hollis experienced one of several strokes of good fortune that were to speed his promotion. Jane Sissmore had a major quarrel with her superiors in which she insulted the deputy director general, Brigadier Harker, and, at her own request, was transferred to the secret service. Hollis automatically succeeded her and then became acting head of Section E. He and his department were soon moved as an evacuation measure to Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, the home of the Duke of Marlborough.

  Hollis married in 1937, but, according to close friends, he chose the wrong wife, as they were temperamentally incompatible. He is remembered by a wartime woman colleague as being ‘very good-looking, in spite of his round shoulders, dark, and of medium height’. Others who worked with him say that he was secretively quiet but dry and witty in conversation, with an inexhaustible fund of smutty stories. He was known as a good briefer, concise and clear with his instructions. When he attended meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he usually said very little unless questioned. ‘He never believed in stirring things up: controversy was not for him,’ George Young, a former deputy director of the secret service, recalls.

  He did, however, occasionally raise eyebrows in areas outside MI5 concerning his judgement about the dangers of communism. Col. Noel Wild, who had been in charge of deception techniques at SHAEF during the war and was later involved in cover plans in the Defence Ministry, told me of an incident that had worried him. When he and Hollis had been discussing a possible operation against extreme left-wing trade union leaders, Hollis had predicted, ‘There will never be a threat from communism to this country.’

  According to Sir Dick White, who eventually wrote Hollis’s obituary notice in The Times, ‘the hotter the climate of national security the cooler he became’. That, no doubt, was an excellent temperament for a director general of MI5, beset, as Hollis was, with an unprecedented succession of security disasters. But, as Philby and Blunt showed, it was also an essential attribute for a spy, invidious though the comparison may sound.

  Hollis was still in charge of Section F in 1944 when Philby became his opposite number in the secret service, as I have described. It is certain that Philby was then an active spy for Russia, even, according to himself, an officer of the KGB. He was under continuous KGB control and took no decisions on any important issue without first consulting his Soviet superiors, using the excuse that he needed time for thought in order to effect the necessary meetings. If Hollis was then a penetration agent operating on a similar scale, as those who investigated him believe, he and Philby formed a most dangerous axis.

  When Clement Attlee appointed Sir Percy Sillitoe, the former chief constable, director general of MI5 in May 1946, the prime task allotted to him was the investigation and elimination of communist subversion. He instructed Hollis to brief him in writing, but all that Hollis did was to hand him a description of the state of the Communist Party, which he had already compiled. Sillitoe’s biographer, A. W. Cockerill, records that Sir Percy was deeply disappointed because Hollis provided little evidence of communist subversion. Yet, by 1950, Attlee and his Cabinet were convinced from their own resources that British communists were behind a series of crippling strikes and acts of subversion.

  Sir Percy Sillitoe’s son, Tony, has told me how the secret service career officers reacted to the appointment of a policeman to direct them with a campaign of noncooperation and personal hostility, which was not unconnected with the fact that most of the senior promotions had been set back several years:

  The campaign was led by Hollis, whom my father despised and distrusted. When my father called for files relevant to the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, before flying to Washington to see Edgar Hoover, Hollis failed to produce them saying they had ‘gone missing’ or were ‘unavailable’. There was something about ‘dear Roger’, as my father called him, that disturbed his policeman’s instincts.

  In 1947 Alexander Foote, a Briton who had been a key member of the astonishingly successful Soviet espionage operation in Switzerland called the Lucy Ring, offered his services to the West and was heavily interrogated by MI5. Among many things he revealed were details of the espionage activities of Ursula Beurton. He told them how Beurton, then known to him only as ‘Sonya’, had been detailed to train him in operating ‘music boxes’, as the KGB called radio transmitters. She had tried to convince Foote that she wanted to leave Switzerland because she was so ‘shattered’ by Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler, but her previously total dedication to the communist cause suggested a different reason for the determination of this ‘demurely dressed woman with black hair, good figure and even better legs’ to reach Britain.

  Hollis, still the key figure in Soviet counter-espionage, could not ignore Foote’s information had he wanted to and was obliged to take some action against Ursula, who was living near Chipping Norton with her English husband, Len Brewer, a Soviet agent also known as Leon Beurton. What happened suggests that the approach to this woman spy was criminally soft. She was told that MI5 knew that she had been a Soviet agent in her early days but was convinced that she had been totally disillusioned by the unprovoked Soviet attack on Finland in November 1939 – a year before she had arrived in England. This made no sense in view of her known participation in the Lucy Ring in 1940.

  Naturally, she agreed with what the MI5 interviewers had been instructed to tell her, assured them that she had never spied in Britain, but refused to cooperate any further. If MI5 had made routine inquiries in the area of George Street in the Summertown district of Oxford where she had lived, they could have found evidence that she regularly used a radio transmitter during the war, putting up an aerial from a neighbour’s chimney for the purpose. They might also have learned of her regular visits to the Banbury area, where she had taken over the atomic secrets supplied by Klaus Fuchs, and of contacts with other agents living in the Oxford area, as Hollis had been during the time that she was active. The MI5 men made no effort to see her again and had little chance to do so, for Ursula and her husband moved to East Germany.

  The team that eventually was to investigate Hollis discovered not only that Ursula Beurton had been a long-term professionally trained spy but that it was her brother Jurgen, another German taking refuge in Britain, who had first been approached by Fuchs when the atom scientist decided to betray secret information. Furthermore, her father, Professor Rene Kuczynski, an economist teaching in Oxford, also supplied secret political information
that he secured from conversations with Sir Stafford Cripps, then a member of the War Cabinet.

  Whatever the purposes of the MI5 visit to Ursula, the only one it served was to warn her that she was under suspicion and should get herself behind the Iron Curtain. The implications of her presence in Oxford, as regards Hollis, were not appreciated fully until 1967.

  When the Attlee government decided to ‘purge’ known communists out of sensitive areas of the civil service in 1948 because they could be potential spies, Hollis was in charge of the drive. A few high-level communists were removed from secret work, and the Communist Party made maximum propaganda use of them. But several, who should have been detected in the more stringent screening measures supposed to have been introduced, remained in their trusted positions. A few, who had been transferred to non-secret work, even managed to filter back during the expansion consequent to the rearmament program of the ’50s.

  Sir Percy Sillitoe, who had become head of MI5 in 1946, was determined to apply the communist purge to his own organisation but met with considerable internal resistance and scant help from Hollis.

  One communist of historic significance, who was taken into top-secret work during the period when Hollis was responsible for overseeing communist activities in Britain, was Dr Klaus Fuchs. His communist past was known soon after he arrived as a German refugee in 1933, but MI5, which investigated him six times between 1941 and 1948, raised only vague objections, even after his name was seen on a captured copy of the Gestapo wanted list. An MI5 analysis in 1946 suggested that Fuchs might be a Soviet agent, but the report from Hollis’s section rated the risk as slight, and he was cleared for work at the new Harwell atomic station.