Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

I was not unduly surprised by this discovery, for I had surmised that former security and intelligence officers to whom I had written for advice or whom I had approached personally would have reported the events back to their old offices. Scores of people connected with Whitehall and Westminster knew that I was contemplating some publication or other about the Hollis affair and had been for some years. Jonathan Aitken had alerted the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office to the fact that journalists were actively investigating the suspicions that had arisen in MI5 concerning both Hollis and Mitchell.

  If Downing Street already had access to the script of Their Trade is Treachery, why had the Cabinet secretary so urgently requested a copy for the Prime Minister? To forestall a barrage of individual parliamentary questions about points in the book, especially those concerning Driberg and other former and existing MPs, Mrs Thatcher was determined to clear the problem away on the first day of the book’s publication by announcing the Security Commission inquiry. I have no doubt that the Cabinet Office received a copy of the text as soon as MI5 secured it and that a brief was made available to the Prime Minister then. Without a copy of the book provided by the publisher, it would have become obvious that the text had been obtained surreptitiously and its source had to be covered. There was the further point that the Cabinet Office would want to ensure that no last-minute changes had been made in the text before publication, though I regard it as probable that MI5 had also secured an advance copy of the bound volume.

  If there had been serious breaches of the Official Secrets Act really damaging to national security, it would have been the government’s duty to prevent them by warning myself and the publisher before the book appeared. That it did not do so after reading the text implies that ministers and their advisers took a decision on the security issues. Sir Robert Armstrong’s quick agreement not to prevent or interfere with publication could only have meant that it had already been decided that there were no realistic grounds for proceedings under the Official Secrets Act at that stage or that it would be impolitic to institute them. This, presumably, was also the reason why the Daily Mail received no complaint from the secretary of the D-Notice Committee drawing attention to the D-Notice specifically referring to intelligence and security matters.

  Recent interviews I have had with Jonathan Aitken show that he and his own excellent MI5 source, whose identity is known to the government, stand firm on the original evidence that Aitken submitted to Mrs Thatcher early in 1980. They both accept, as I now do, that Lord Trend declared Hollis not guilty for want of sufficient corroborated evidence to the contrary, though his innocence could not be proved, either. I happen to know, however, that Aitken’s informant, who could not have been closer to the action, believes Hollis to have been guilty and to have been ‘cleared’ as Philby was ‘cleared’ in 1955. I also know that his account of such cases as those of Driberg, Ellis, Cairncross and others would be very similar to mine. I can say in all honesty that I have never met or spoken with this man, whose loyalty is beyond question. His evidence, therefore, is quite independent from mine.

  Much was made by newspapers of the fact that, in answer to a parliamentary question, the Prime Minister stated that an official inquiry was being made into the sources of my information for this book. Journalists who consulted No. 10 Downing Street were told that the inquiry was being conducted by MI5. That has proved to be the case. I know of former members of MI5 and the secret service who have been interviewed about specific matters in this book that, according to one of them, ‘read as though they were straight out of the official files’. To date, nobody has asked to question me, suggesting that the inquiry is internal for MI5’s own purposes. A similar inquiry stimulated by a series of parliamentary questions took place consequent to the publication of my previous book, Inside Story, in 1978, with no result affecting the author.

  So far, the main result of the inquiry has been to deter present and former members of MI5 and the secret service from publicly confirming what I have written, which several of them could do, as Mrs Thatcher has been informed. I do, however, have the private satisfaction of knowing that those interviewed confirmed their belief in almost everything stated in this book.

  The impending publication of Their Trade is Treachery would appear to have put the Prime Minister in a difficult position because, though none of the suspicious events that I record occurred during her premiership, she felt responsible for defending the reputation of the security services as well as she could. There were several politically explosive ingredients in the book, of which the most dangerous was the Hollis affair, about which the public was ignorant. There was no way that Mrs Thatcher could deny the main disclosures that Hollis, when director general of MI5, had been deeply suspected over several years by his own colleagues of being a KGB agent, that he had been interrogated, had failed to clear himself and that, a year after his death, a further inquiry by Lord Trend had been unable to establish his innocence.

  Whatever the results of the Trend inquiry, it would have been virtually impossible for the Prime Minister to have admitted that Hollis had been a spy or to have given any other result beyond the statement that he had been ‘cleared’. The consequences internationally would have been too damaging.

  Shortly after the Prime Minister’s statement, a privy councillor who had read the Trend Report gave me a verbal summary of it. Since then, information from others, including a senior minister in the present government and others from previous governments, have confirmed that summary and expanded on it. The main point that I have established beyond all doubt is that no new evidence whatever accrued to Lord Trend during his inquiry. Recalling a statement that Mrs Thatcher made about this book, I can say with certainty that the Trend Report contained no information that was new to the security authorities who had carried out the original inquiries into the Hollis affair.

  To summarise, it would seem, then, that in cricket parlance all that Trend was able to do was to give an umpire’s verdict on an appeal by a hostile bowling side insisting that Hollis was ‘out’. After an agonising, year-long deliberation, during which he consulted other ‘umpires’, like Sir Dick White, he gave Hollis the benefit of the doubt with a ‘not out’ verdict. It is a verdict that could still be shown to be mistaken, though this seems unlikely because of the age of the case. The only certainty in my mind is that, if evidence disputing the verdict ever arrives in MI5 or in any other secret department, it will be withheld there from the public, as almost everything else in this book was, unless some investigative writer with prime source contacts chances to uncover it.

  It is the opinion of former senior officers of MI5, the secret service and the CIA that Mrs Thatcher went unnecessarily far in trying to convince the public that Hollis had been effectively cleared of ever having been a KGB agent. So her position, as well as that of the officials who advised her, could be at risk. She might have been more cautious had she taken the opportunity of a first-hand rundown on the Hollis case by a senior member of the Fluency Committee when this was offered to her in a letter sent to her by Jonathan Aitken early in 1980. Presumably, she declined that offer on the advice of officials who may not have wished her to receive a first-hand rundown but to put her faith in the Trend Report, which casts doubt on the motives of some of the investigation officers.

  Mrs Thatcher’s rejection of a first-hand rundown surprised me because I am aware of her deep personal interest in security and intelligence affairs. While she was still in opposition, as leader of the Conservative Party, I saw her with the precise purpose of suggesting that she should be regularly given first-hand briefings on such matters by Sir Maurice Oldfield, then head of the secret service. Sir Maurice had asked me to approach her, as protocol forbade him to do so. She seized on the offer, provided that she could first secure the agreement of the Prime Minister, then James Callaghan, which she duly did. Mrs Thatcher and Sir Maurice became firm friends.

  Though Mrs Thatcher did her best for Hollis in her statement, she ‘damned him
with no praise’, as one politician described it. There was no suggestion that he had been an able public servant whose reputation was being traduced. In private, ministers have expressed the opinion that Hollis’s behaviour in office was due to incompetence rather than treachery. One law officer has been reported to me as saying that Hollis was ‘indecisive, ineffectual and bumbling’. It is extremely unlikely, however, that a professional as discerning as Sir Dick White would have recommended a bumbling incompetent either to be his deputy or, later, to succeed him in the top job. When incompetence benefits an adversary on such a scale and over such a long period, deliberate action is a more acceptable explanation.

  In other respects, the brief prepared for Mrs Thatcher and read by her to Parliament was an above-standard example of the Whitehall art of news management. It included the statement that the book contained no information ‘new to the security authorities’. Considering that most of the information, which was entirely new to the public, had originated from the security authorities, this was, in its way, a compliment, but those who prepared the brief and are well versed in the idiosyncrasies of Fleet Street foresaw that those newspapers envious of the Daily Mail’s exclusive acquisition of the serial rights would misconstrue the phrase as meaning that the book contained nothing new, period.

  The brief then went on to suggest that the investigation of Hollis had been almost a routine procedure, one among many inquiries into various leads. In fact, Hollis was the first director general of MI5 to fall under any suspicion whatever. Nobody anywhere near that rank, in either MI5 or the secret service, had ever been investigated before, and the brief was careful to avoid confirming that the deputy director, Graham Mitchell, had been suspected at the same time. The situation had been quite unprecedented, but the Prime Minister was required to do all she could to play it down.

  In doing this, she was also led to claim that the leads pointing to Hollis could be attributed to Philby or Blunt, a statement that, as I have explained, is certainly false and her advisers may come to regret. To recall but one example, Blunt convinced his interrogators, who were not particularly disposed to believe all he told them, that he could not possibly have been the wartime spy inside MI5 with the codename ‘Elli’. Nor could ‘Elli’ have been Philby, who was not in MI5. ‘Elli’ could, however, have been Hollis.

  The suggestion that Hollis’s behaviour after the end of the war was not the subject of inquiry by the security authorities is so patently false as to throw doubt on the rest of the statement. Apart from the fact that I know that the Fluency Committee continued their inquiries with increasing intensity until his retirement in late 1965 and afterward until his recall for interrogation in 1970, it is inconceivable that, if the KGB had managed to recruit Hollis during the war years, they would have left him alone when he became deputy director and then director general. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the statement prepared by officials for Mrs Thatcher was angled to suggest that all the suspicions originated forty years ago or more in what has been described as ‘the poisoned past’ covering the activities of the proven spies, Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt.

  The serious problems in MI5, which are not explicable unless there was a spy at a high level there, did not disappear after Blunt and Philby left. They did appear to cease when Hollis retired.

  During the many interviews I have given about the contents of this book, I have been asked repeatedly if I believe that Hollis was a spy. I have taken the view that, as the circumstances are so complex, the facts should be allowed to speak for themselves. I have to say, however, that I am not impressed by the final decision of Lord Trend virtually to exonerate Hollis or by the government’s decision to accept the verdict as final. The evidence that there was a high-level ‘mole’ in MI5 not only during the war but up to the mid ’60s seems more compelling to me the more that I study it. Trend’s decision that this evidence did not incriminate Hollis does not dispose of it. If Hollis was not guilty, who was? It would seem to be unlikely now, because of the passage of time and people, that there will ever be a satisfactory answer to this question.

  Before accepting the Trend Report as the final answer on the Hollis affair, I suggest that readers should recall the ‘clearance’ of Philby by the then Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, in 1955. This followed the publication of a brief and uninformative official report on the defection of Burgess and Maclean calculated to give the impression that neither had been important spies, though the damage that had been inflicted by Maclean was already well understood. Philby was ‘cleared’ because, in spite of the suspicion against him, there was no evidence that could have been brought into a British court. Unless a suspect confesses, there hardly ever is. Had Philby accepted the immunity to prosecution on offer to him eight years later in Beirut, this ‘clearance’ would have continued so far as the public was concerned.

  Philby himself may have something to say about Hollis if he ever completes the book he is thought to be writing, though of course this would be another KGB-controlled exercise and his statements would need expert analysis.

  Mrs Thatcher referred to other ‘distortions’ and ‘inaccuracies’ in this book but declined to identify any of them. In such a context, a ‘distortion’ is an interpretation of which Whitehall disapproves. As regards ‘inaccuracies’, nobody who was close to the action has been able to point to any, save for the final rendering of the Trend Report and an odd date, which has since been corrected. On the contrary, confirmatory information has flowed in from witnesses; as a result, I have been able not only to expand the original material but to identify people concerned.

  The events that followed in Parliament immediately after the conclusion of the Prime Minister’s statement were peculiar, to say the least. Michael Foot, the Labour leader, who had been advised of the contents of the Prime Minister’s statement in advance, seized on the opportunity to stifle questions about Driberg, his former friend and socialist colleague, by referring to the unidentified ‘inaccuracies’. In fact, every aspect of the Driberg affair, as stated in this book, is correct.

  The Speaker then permitted only eight back-bench MPs among the many who wished to ask questions to do so. Those whom he selected to speak proved to be noncontroversial. One of them even suggested that I had been the victim of a KGB disinformation exercise: as I then pointed out in a letter to The Times, if that had been so, then many of my informants, who included former prime ministers, home secretaries, foreign secretaries, and defence and intelligence chiefs, must have been working for the KGB.

  The most extraordinary parliamentary result of the Prime Minister’s statement was the attitude of MPs of all parties in desisting from asking any parliamentary questions on the numerous issues raised by the book’s disclosures. Normally, back-bench MPs seize on any controversial question that will get their names into the newspapers or, better still, on radio and television. Yet they took the view that, once the Prime Minister had announced the setting up of the Security Commission’s inquiry, no further questions needed to be asked until it had reported. This was quite unjustified because the Prime Minister’s statement made it clear that the Security Commission would not be investigating the specific allegations in this book but only examining the precautions being taken now against further penetration of secret departments by foreign intelligence agents.

  My inquiries suggest that the Conservative MPs, who have an ingrained objection to making any criticism of the security and intelligence services, remained quiet in support of the Prime Minister. Those of the left were too embarrassed by the disclosures about Driberg, their former party chairman, and other Labour MPs to pursue any of the issues, especially when the party was beset with a crucial struggle for power between the moderates and the communist-inclined far left.

  I am confident that the situation would have been very different in the United States, where the issues would have been more thoroughly discussed and investigated. If the Watergate scandal or anything like it had occurred in Britain, it
is unlikely that it would have been fully exposed as it was in America because neither Parliament nor the press would have pursued it to conclusion. Both would have become bored with it. As Sir Harold Wilson said, ‘A week is a long time in politics.’ So it is in British journalism.

  At the individual level, the reaction of those who knew the spies and suspects I name for the first time has been, almost universally, ‘The allegation must be false because had this person been a spy I would have known it.’ Normally intelligent and perceptive people wrote to newspapers denying the evidence about their friends without offering any rebuttal beyond their gut feelings. Even Michael Foot dismissed the information about Driberg’s activities on the grounds that, had it been true, it would have leaked years ago. In fact, the security services have been very efficient at keeping their secrets from the public, if not from the enemy. KGB agents have proved even more adept. The two wives with whom Philby spent most of his adult life had no inkling that he was a spy. Neither did the family or friends of Colonel Ellis, John Cairncross or Anthony Blunt, save for those who were helping them.

  The case histories outlined in this book demonstrate that anybody can turn out to be spy. Who would have thought that Burgess, the habitual drunkard and pouncing homosexual, could keep a secret? Blunt, the sensitive aesthete, Philby, the affable guy, Maclean, the polished diplomat during office hours, Cairncross, the unremarkable civil servant, Ellis, the former soldier, and others whom I cannot name yet because of the libel laws, all were traitors; in my view, there is no worse crime. A mass murderer can take a score of lives, but in a nuclear age the traitor can endanger the lives of millions.

  The attitude of former colleagues of those MI5 and secret service officers who proved to be traitors is particularly intriguing. One would imagine that there would be no sympathy for the man who has been systematically undermining a protective organisation in the interests of an alien country. It was this reasonable belief that provoked Colonel Ellis’s daughter into declaring that her father could not have been a spy because Sir Maurice Oldfield, while head of the secret service, had sent a congratulatory cable on the occasion of the colonel’s eightieth birthday. Yet shortly before Sir Maurice died, at his hospital bedside, I discussed the Ellis case with him and he knew all about Ellis’s confession of spying for the Germans. Another secret service officer who knew all about Ellis’s guilt and confirmed it independently to me told me that he had admonished Oldfield for being so forgiving toward such a traitor.