The MI5 officers, whose hands had been tied by one negative directive after another, not only disagreed with the findings of the report but regarded the facts on which they had been based as a shameful indictment of their organisation and of their leader in particular.
I shall be dealing shortly with the Blunt case in considerable detail, revealing why he confessed and all that he disclosed, including his leads to other suspects, such as the likely Fifth Man of the original Ring of Five. It is relevant, however, at this point to record Hollis’s behaviour with respect to the case.
As will be seen, because of the nature of the unexpected event that led to the reopening of the interrogation of Blunt in 1964, Hollis had no option but to take some action. From that moment on, he seemed to do everything he could to help Blunt and frustrate those who were determined to extract every scrap of useful information from the self-confessed traitor.
As soon as Arthur Martin, the very experienced case officer handling Blunt, had induced him to accept immunity to prosecution in return for a full confession, he reported it to Hollis, who kept himself at a distance from the operation. Martin then wanted to interrogate Blunt without delay, but Hollis took the view that there was no need for hurry and the right course was to treat Blunt very gently. An argument ensued, and Hollis made it an excuse for suspending Martin from duty for two weeks. Martin insisted that, even if he had to stay away from headquarters for reasons he failed to understand, he should go ahead with the interrogation of Blunt, which was taking place in Blunt’s flat, anyway. Hollis ordered him to leave Blunt alone.
As a result, Blunt was left free from questioning and surveillance for a fortnight. Nobody knows whether he consulted the Russians in that time and sought their advice about what he should admit when eventually interrogated. There is no doubt that he did mislead his interrogators later, especially over friends who were still in high places.
When Blunt gave leads to high-level suspects, whether knowingly or inadvertently, Hollis was most reluctant to give permission for them to be questioned. One, ruled out by Hollis as being ‘too close to retirement’, turned out later to have been a major source of secret information for Guy Burgess. When Martin complained again, Hollis took the almost unprecedented step of dismissing him from the organisation. Martin assumed then that Hollis had realised that he suspected him and therefore wanted rid of him. That is still Martin’s view. The view of Martin’s former colleagues is that the dismissal of this outstandingly able counter-intelligence officer was a major victory for the KGB.
Certainly, after Martin’s departure, little progress could be made with any of the suspects indicated through Blunt, or through previous sources, until Hollis lost control of the situation with his retirement.
It is possible that, with regard to Blunt, Hollis was so appalled by the confirmation of the existence of a major spy in MI5 throughout the war that he wanted it played down in the interests of the department’s reputation and of his own as director general. In that case, he would have to be judged at least derelict in his duty, for his senior officers were all most anxious to derive the maximum information from Blunt about the penetration of their organisation.
Hollis’s behaviour in the Blunt case, as in the Profumo affair, makes real sense only in the context that he was under regular KGB control himself. It was not in the Soviet interest for Blunt to be milked of all his knowledge, and, if Hollis was guilty, there was always the danger that some remark, inadvertent or otherwise, might lead to him.
Though Blunt insisted that he had no idea whether Hollis was a fellow spy or not, because his controllers would never have hinted at it, he volunteered some information that increased suspicion against the director general. Blunt said that, while his Russian controllers had urged him to secure information from many areas in MI5 while he had worked there, they had never suggested that he should try to discover anything from directorate F., which was then being run by Hollis. Blunt admitted that this was peculiar and could suggest that the Russians already had a sufficient flow of information from that directorate, which was obviously of prime importance to them.
The situation also suggested an explanation of why the KGB had allowed Blunt to quit MI5 as soon as the war ended. Blunt told his questioners that the KGB could easily have forced him to stay on and that, as he enjoyed the work, he would not have been ‘too unhappy’ about remaining in MI5 for a few more years. If Hollis had also been a spy, clearly earmarked for steady promotion, the KGB could afford to allow Blunt to leave.
With so much reference to so much supposition, I feel it necessary to state yet again that every allegation and suspicion that I record arose inside MI5 from loyal MI5 officers assisted by independent assessors from the secret service, all motivated purely by determination to solve the mystery of the stream of failures and root out any traitors responsible for them.
CHAPTER 10
INTERROGATION EXTRAORDINARY
IN RETIREMENT ON a modest pension, Sir Roger Hollis went to live in a cottage in Catcott in Somerset. There he took part in the village life, becoming a rural district councillor, and is remembered by a near neighbour, Mr F. M. Heywood, as ‘very pleasant, much liked in the village. He was quiet and never said a word about his old job, though we knew what it had been.’
He played more golf, improving his game sufficiently to represent the county. He became captain of the Burnham-Berrow Club and president of the Somerset Golfing Union. None of this would seem to fit the character of a Soviet spy, but neither did Anthony Blunt’s posts as director of the Courtauld Institute and surveyor of the Queen’s pictures.
Hollis retained contact with a few old friends, who remember him with affection, but, while it is customary for former chiefs of the security and intelligence services to meet in London on special social occasions, Sir Roger did not attend them. On one occasion, at a dinner for a retiring senior civil servant, all the former surviving intelligence and security chiefs were invited with one exception. ‘Of course, we didn’t invite Hollis,’ the man who had organised the dinner explained. Nor did Hollis receive any of the appointments offered to men of distinction in their retirement, whereas Arthur Martin, the officer he had fired, was given a retirement post in the infrastructure of Parliament.
At the height of the suspicions against him, in 1966, he was awarded a KBE in the New Year Honours. I am told that those involved in recommending the Queen to give this routine award would not have been informed of the suspicions, and no attempt was made to stop the award. Nor was Anthony Blunt deprived of his knighthood when he confessed to having been a spy. That occurred only after his treachery became public knowledge.
Hollis became national news in February 1968 when he divorced his wife after thirty-one years of marriage. Lady Hollis, who died recently, named ‘the other woman’ as Miss Edith ‘Val’ Hammond, who had been Hollis’s secretary in MI5 for eighteen years. Hollis was extremely secretive by nature, and, if he did indulge in extramural clandestine activities, Miss Hammond knew nothing about them. Popular in the organisation, she was promoted to officer rank after Hollis retired but left soon afterward to marry him in 1968. It seems unlikely that he ever told her that he was under suspicion or had been interrogated. He certainly never mentioned it to close friends whom I have questioned.
In 1970, Hollis was invited to MI5 headquarters in London and officially faced with the allegations about him. He was seen first by his successor, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, who said in a friendly way that the allegations just had to be cleared up. He was then transferred to a ‘safe house’ nearby, which had been ‘taped and miked’ – as he must have guessed – for a full interrogation that lasted two days. His interrogators, led by an ex-marine commando, John Day, were former colleagues, so the atmosphere must have been electric.
Hollis was taken through the whole of his early life and did not hold back on his friendship with communists at Oxford or on his meetings with Agnes Smedley in Shanghai. But he was vague and misleading about his life after
he returned to Britain. It was noted, for instance, that he said that he could not remember the address of the first house in which he had lived after his first marriage. Inquiries had shown that a former Oxford University friend, Archie Lyall, who had also been a companion of Burgess, had lived only four doors down. Lyall had worked in the secret service while Hollis was in MI5 in London, and, apart from the likelihood that they met professionally, they had used the same railway station.
Being a huge, shambling man, fat, flamboyant and irrepressibly amiable, Lyall would have been difficult to miss, yet Hollis denied that he ever knew that Lyall had been such a close neighbour. This was interpreted as a device to avoid admitting any connection with his former friend because anyone who had ever been involved with Burgess could be suspect, though, in fact, there was never any suspicion against Lyall.
Hollis could offer no satisfactory answer as to why he had been so doggedly determined to join MI5, agreeing that it was the prime target for any Briton recruited to Soviet intelligence. Weakly, he insisted that he just thought that the work would be interesting.
He claimed that he must just have forgotten to put a note about his friendship with Claud Cockburn in the office files. He denied ever having met Ursula Beurton in China, Switzerland or Oxford. He explained that he had fired Arthur Martin because a ‘Gestapo’, intent on investigating every failure, was forming inside MI5. (This may have been the origin of Sir Harold Wilson’s later phrase about a small group of ‘fascists’ among the officers in MI5.)
As befitted a professional, Hollis remained very composed throughout his interrogation, and, whether guilty or not, was rated a ‘tough subject’.
After an interval, for further inquiries, Hollis was brought back for a half day of interrogation, but he never broke. If guilty, he would have been aware of the strength of his position so long as he kept his nerve and declined to confess. As with Fuchs, Blake, Philby and Blunt, the law was powerless to do anything without a confession, and having been ‘close to the horns’ in those cases, and in others that had not become public, Hollis could feel totally secure both from prosecution and publicity.
The possibility of offering Hollis immunity was never seriously considered because it was realised that he must know that a prosecution would never be brought in any circumstances. Even if further evidence accrued, the government, whatever its complexion, would decide that a trial of a former director general of MI5 would not be ‘in the public interest’. Even if such a trial were held partly in camera its effects on relations with foreign intelligence services, particularly those of the United States, could be disastrous. The FBI and the CIA knew all the secret details of the Hollis case, but Congress and the American public did not. The sense of outrage that a trial would engender in the United States could curtail the continuing interchange between Britain and America of intelligence and defence information.
The Hollis affair might have been left buried within the vaults of MI5, but certain members of that service and of the secret service were so concerned about the Soviet penetrations, which, in their opinion, had never been satisfactorily accounted for, that they agitated privately for an independent inquiry. They also wanted an independent method of electing the new directors general of MI5 and the secret service. In the past, this had been done by the Prime Minister, acting largely on the advice of the retiring chiefs, so that if a director general happened to be a Soviet agent – and Philby could have reached that position – he could recommend a successor of whom the Russians approved.
So, in the early summer of 1974, a spokesman for the Fluency Committee, Stephen de Mowbray, presented himself at No. 10 Downing Street and asked to see the Prime Minister concerning an urgent security issue. He did not see Harold Wilson, who had recently won the general election, but had a long session with the Cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, now Lord Hunt of Tanworth.
Hunt was already aware of the suspicions about Hollis. A few months before, during the premiership of Edward Heath, there had been discussions about the dangers of penetration of the security services by the KGB and particularly about the possibility that previous traitors, of whom Hollis might have been one, could have insinuated others at lower level, who might now be nearing the top. It had been decided then that some independent body, to which allegations of possible treachery might be referred, was desirable. For security reasons, it was also decided that the members of such a body should be senior privy councillors. When discussing possible names, the security problems seemed so severe that it was eventually decided to have just one privy councillor, an individual of long experience, of unquestionable integrity, who should be non-political. The man eventually selected was Lord Trend, Hunt’s predecessor as Cabinet secretary, and he agreed to be the standing privy councillor to whom allegations concerning treachery in the security services could be referred.
After his session with de Mowbray, who seemed to be convinced that Hollis had been a spy and that there had been a serious cover-up by the security services, Hunt decided that the matter should be referred to Trend. He therefore suggested this to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who agreed to the proposal in July 1974.
When Trend began his inquiry, he did not think it likely that he could take the matter any further than the internal investigations previously carried out by the Fluency Committee and on which assessments had been made by the chiefs of MI5 and the secret service. While some members of the Fluency Committee were convinced of Hollis’s guilt and the rest took the line that the case was not proven either way, the chiefs had decided to consider Hollis innocent unless and until further evidence arrived to change their minds. This had enabled an embarrassing situation to be shelved – permanently, it had been hoped – and had spared the expenditure of further manpower and money on it.
As I have indicated, the security officers who continued to suspect Hollis, some of them being convinced of his guilt, believe that Lord Trend was impressed by the weight of evidence they had produced. I have been assured – and reassured – that Lord Trend told them so. Furthermore, those to whom I have spoken claim that they were never told anything to the contrary. They were left under the firm impression that the Hollis case was to remain in an unproven condition because no new evidence had become available to settle the issue either way. That was, therefore, my information when I wrote the first edition of this book.
In fact, Trend took almost a whole year before coming to a decision. After interviewing all the members of the Fluency Committee except one who was overseas, he spent two days a week over several months browsing among the relevant archives at MI5 headquarters in Curzon Street. He then consulted security and intelligence chiefs, past and present, including Sir Dick White, the former head of MI5, who had recommended Hollis as his successor there. These men all advocated their past opinion that the evidence was not strong enough definitely to incriminate Hollis, though his innocence could not definitely be proved either. Trend then decided that before writing his report he should come to a judgement that would settle the case one way or the other because there was scant likelihood that any further evidence would ever accrue.
Before Mrs Thatcher made her parliamentary statement about this book, it was impossible to secure any official confirmation that the Trend inquiry had ever taken place, much less obtain any information about its contents. Since then, I have been able to consult several people who have read it. They have all confirmed that no further evidence reached Trend during his year of deliberation. I have checked their information at several crucial points. Gouzenko, for instance, has assured me that no intelligence officer has questioned him about Hollis since 1973.
So far as the facts were concerned Trend was in no better a position than the members of the Fluency Committee had been when they had completed their inquiries by interrogating Hollis.
The case really remained – and still remains – ‘unproven’, but such a verdict, though long established in Scotland, does not exist in English law. Trend therefore took a value judgem
ent and decided that, while he could not be certain that Hollis had not been a spy, he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Unless further evidence arrived, the security departments should assume – which they did with relief – that Hollis had not been an agent of the KGB. Trend, however, was unable to offer any other explanation of the mass of evidence that had been stacked up against Hollis.
In his report to the Prime Minister, Trend also stated that there was no truth in Stephen de Mowbray’s contention that there had been a ‘cover-up’ of the Hollis affair. In the Whitehall mind, a ‘cover-up’ is a situation in which officials withhold embarrassing information from ministers. In the mind of most people, including myself, a ‘cover-up’ is a situation in which both officials and ministers withhold embarrassing information from the public that employs them. In this latter and more general sense, there had been a total cover-up of the Hollis affair and of most of the other security scandals disclosed in this book.
In 1975, Stephen de Mowbray was seen by Sir John Hunt and briefed on Trend’s findings, though he was not shown the report. He declined to accept the findings, arguing that Trend had simply followed the convenient departmental line previously taken by the heads of MI5 and the secret service. The Cabinet secretary assumed that de Mowbray would inform the other members of the Fluency Committee that a verdict of ‘not guilty’ had been entered against Hollis on the departmental books. He appears not to have done so, for, as I have indicated, the other members continued to believe that the Hollis case had been left unproven.
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