Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences

by Chapman. Pincher

  Two defectors from the KGB – Igor Gouzenko, the cypher clerk who had fled to the West in 1945, the relevant date, and Vladimir Petrov, who had defected in Australia in 1954 – were also asked to translate the paragraph and came up with precisely the same result. Both said that Volkov could only have meant that there was an important KGB spy inside MI5. The defector Anatoli Golitsin, too, came up with the same solution.

  The man inside MI5 who best fitted the description in 1945 had unquestionably been Hollis, who had then been responsible – as acting head – for the department specialising in countering the intelligence activities of Russian spies and communist agents in Britain.

  From that moment the investigation was concentrated on Hollis with new fervour. It was quickly realised that Hollis was also a good fit for ‘Elli’, the spy indicated by Gouzenko as operating inside MI5 for the GRU section of Soviet intelligence.

  It had been Hollis who had been sent out to Ottawa to deal with the MI5 aspects of the Gouzenko revelations, so it could have been a case of ‘Elli’ being investigated on the spot in Canada by ‘Elli’ himself. While discussing this possibility with me recently Gouzenko disclosed new information which seems to strengthen it:

  I was surprised that this man who, though only about forty, was so stooped that he approached me almost in a crouching way, asked me very little when I told him that the Russians had a spy inside MI5 in England known by the codename ‘Elli’. He took a few notes but did not show them to me.

  Gouzenko then revealed that the original report about him put in to MI5 was read over to him twenty-seven years later in 1972, when he was questioned about it by a British counter-intelligence officer he knew as Stewart, though that may not have been his real name.

  Stewart was stationed in Washington and asked to see me at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. He read me a long report – several typed sheets – paragraph by paragraph. I was astonished to learn that this was the report submitted by the man, who could only have been Hollis, because I could not understand how he had written so much when he had asked me so little.

  I soon discovered why because the report was full of nonsense and lies. For instance, he reported me as telling him that I knew, in 1945, that there was a spy working for Britain in a high-level government office in Moscow. I knew no such thing and had said nothing like that.

  As Stewart read the report to me it became clear that it had been faked to destroy my credibility so that my information about the spy in MI5 called ‘Elli’ could be ignored. If the report was written by Hollis then there is no doubt that he was a spy. I suspect that Hollis himself was ‘Elli’ and he may have feared that I might recognise him if I had seen a photograph of him in the files in Moscow but as a cypher-clerk I had no opportunity to see photographs.

  Public knowledge about Gouzenko’s original revelations has been severely limited by a series of suspicious events. Crucial documents dealing with them have disappeared from the Canadian Archives. Extensive searches have failed to find the records of a high-level committee set up to examine the ramifications.

  Only one of the scores of diaries kept by the former Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King is missing. It is the very volume dealing with his account of Gouzenko’s interrogation by MI5.

  ‘It cannot be coincidence that these documents are missing,’ Gouzenko said. ‘They must have been removed on somebody’s behalf.’ This suspicion was echoed by J. W. Pickersgill, a literary executor of Mackenzie King’s estate: ‘If there is one volume that the Soviets would have liked to get their hands on it is the missing volume.’

  Gouzenko also gave me evidence suggesting that some similar ‘weeding’ of embarrassing security files may have taken place in London:

  Stewart, the British counter-intelligence officer, returned to see me again in 1973. He showed me six or seven photographs and asked if I could recognise any of them as the man who had first interrogated me – meaning Hollis, though he did not give his name. I picked one out but could not be sure because so much time had gone by.

  It seemed that the British were trying to establish the identity of the person who had interviewed me – as though they had no record of it. Perhaps someone had destroyed the MI5 records. It was all very odd and Stewart offered no explanation.

  There were other aspects of the Gouzenko case which indicated that immediately after he had defected and when the Canadians were trying to keep his movements secret the Russians were getting playback information from somebody involved in the day-to-day handling of the case. Mackenzie King, who handled the Gouzenko defection personally, was most anxious to ensure that the Russians, who knew only that Gouzenko had fled their embassy, should not learn that he was already in the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  When Mackenzie King came to London soon after Gouzenko’s defection to discuss espionage and other matters with the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, it was Hollis who went aboard the Queen Mary when it docked at Southampton with a message for him. It concerned a request from the US President, Harry Truman, that the arrest of Nunn May, an English atomic spy unmasked by Gouzenko, should be postponed. MI5 knew when and where Nunn May was scheduled to meet a Russian contact but once again there seemed to have been a tip-off and neither man appeared.

  During Mackenzie King’s visit there also occurred a strange encounter at an official function between him and the Soviet ambassador in London, Feodor Gusev. The Canadian suspected from their conversation that the Russian had inside information about the western reaction to the Gouzenko business. Hollis had been present when Canadian and British officials had discussed the possibility of hushing up the whole Gouzenko affair in the long-term interests of East–West political relations, as Montgomery Hyde, who had access to prime source information in the form of King’s diaries, records in his excellent book The Atom Bomb Spies.

  Gouzenko had also reported that ‘Elli’ had had access to files that turned out to have been located at Blenheim Palace, where Hollis was based during the war with his section of MI5. This statement also appeared to clear up a longstanding mystery concerning a professional Russian spy called Ursula Beurton – among many other aliases. She was an important agent and recruiter among the pro-Soviet spies who formed the so-called ‘Lucy Ring’ in Switzerland during the war. She was an expert wireless operator, and, though the Swiss spy ring was being prepared for what turned out to be a crucial intelligence role concerning German military intentions, she had been suddenly switched to Britain, where she arrived, in December 1940, in the guise of a Jewish refugee. She lived in Oxford, where her father had a post at the university.

  It was known that she had served as a courier for the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs in 1942. Suddenly, there was light on what she might have done during the previous year and had continued to do, as well as transmitting the information provided by Fuchs. Fuchs joined the atomic bomb project in May 1941, when he then volunteered his information to the Russians on his own initiative. Until the end of 1941, he passed his secrets to a Soviet embassy official in London called Simon Kremer. Ursula Beurton did not become his controller until 1942, being chosen because Oxford was convenient for Birmingham, where Fuchs worked. Moscow could have had no knowledge before 1941 that Fuchs would become a valuable spy, so Beurton must originally have been sent to Oxford to assist somebody else. Hollis lived in Oxford while working at Blenheim Palace in nearby Woodstock.

  One of Beurton’s fellow spies in Switzerland, Alexander Foote, has recorded that he was led to believe that she had moved to England because she was disenchanted with working for Soviet intelligence. In fact, there is proof that she continued as an efficient and dedicated agent serving several spies operating in Britain. Her radio traffic to and from Moscow was discovered years later among the mass of material recorded during the war but could not be deciphered because she had been meticulous in using the one-time pad system (see pages 71–72). Such an unknown ‘illegal’ agent as Beurton with her transmitter would have been considered much safer
for an important spy living out of London than regular contact with a ‘legal’ controller with diplomatic cover, who would have had to make regular trips to Oxford with little excuse for being there.

  In his description of ‘Elli’, Gouzenko had said that he was so important to the Russians that he was not contacted personally but through dead-letter boxes. These were secret hiding places where messages could be left or gathered. One that was specially favoured was a split in a tomb in a certain graveyard.

  The Fluency Committee made a further study of the tape recordings of Nicholas Elliott’s interrogation of Philby prior to his defection, and the circumstances of the confrontation were analysed again. Hollis had been one of the very few who immediately knew about the new information against Philby provided by Flora Solomon and about the decision to send Elliott to Beirut. He could easily have passed the information to a Soviet controller in London.

  It was also appreciated that Hollis had been perfectly placed to have informed Soviet intelligence about the precise date of Donald Maclean’s interrogation in 1951. Though not even deputy director then, he had been one of five people fully in on the secret because of his special position concerning Soviet counter-espionage.

  Hollis had also known of the arrangements for the surveillance of Maclean. He could have told the Russians that there would be no surveillance after Maclean left Charing Cross station, in central London each evening, for his country home at Tatsfield in Surrey, a fact that Maclean appeared to know. I have been told that Maclean was not followed from Charing Cross to his home or watched there because officials of the Foreign Office had assured MI5 that he would never defect when his wife was so close to confinement. Someone in MI5 must have accepted this ludicrous advice and instructed the watchers accordingly. Hollis could also have told the Russians that secret microphones had been fitted in the Tatsfield house – information that would greatly have facilitated Maclean’s escape with Burgess, as I will explain.

  The CIA analysis of the Maclean case is that it was handled with a highly suspicious degree of incompetence. It would have been standard practice to keep Maclean under tight surveillance and even to warn him that he was to be interrogated with the object of forcing him into some panic measure that would help to betray him. Someone in MI5 must have countermanded the normal practice.

  Officers who were involved with the Maclean case have always insisted that they did not want him to defect, as I and others have suggested. They urgently wanted to interrogate him, especially about the other members of the Ring of Five. But, if Hollis was a spy, he would be under instructions from his Soviet controller to do all he could to ensure that the defection succeeded.

  A survey of Hollis’s behaviour during the Profumo affair, in which he played a major role, showed it to be so peculiar and, whether by design or not, so angled toward the Soviet interest that I shall deal with it separately in some detail. Suffice it to say at this juncture that the KGB may have ‘lit the fuse’ that exploded the Profumo affair and then exploited it ruthlessly and with staggering success.

  There were other aspects of Hollis’s behaviour over the years that intensified the interest of the security investigators. His habit of remaining late in his office in Leconfield House, in Curzon Street, often until about 8 p.m., when nearly all other staff had left, suggested some activity that he wished to keep private. In this context, the clue of the locked drawer of the antique desk fits in. As director general, Hollis did not attend the weekly meetings when watchers were apportioned to the various operations, yet a record of them would be a prime requirement for Soviet intelligence officers operating in London. There was no doubt, from marks on the lock and other clues, that the drawer had been in regular use. Hollis’s office had a connecting door with Mitchell’s, where the desk was located. Hollis may have had the only key to the desk and stayed late in his office on the evening when permission was sought to open it the following day. So he had been given ample warning to whip out the tape recorder if that is what the locked drawer had contained.

  His habit of walking home after staying late at the office was also noted in his dossier. Though he had a chauffeured car at his disposal, he would regularly walk to his house in Campden Hill Square, across Hyde Park, a convenient rendezvous if, by that time, he was in contact with a controller, and also offering a variety of places for leaving information if personal contact was still barred.

  Hollis’s attempted destruction of the diaries of Guy Liddell, several volumes of which give a full record of MI5 activities throughout the war, could have been in the Soviet interest. Even odder was his behaviour concerning the records of the early interrogations of Anthony Blunt, which began some eighteen months before he retired. The tapes were transcribed and then summarised. While the summaries were retained for the record, Hollis ordered the destruction of all the tapes and transcripts.

  The strange insistence of Hollis that he must fly to Washington alone to convey the news about the suspicion concerning Mitchell to Hoover and McCone also began to make sense. It could have been the panic reaction of a man anxious to demonstrate that he could hardly be a traitor if he was so keen to unmask another. By indicating the nature of his urgent mission to the British ambassador in Washington, Hollis might have expected that this would be relayed to the Foreign Secretary and one day might stand him in good stead if ever he fell under suspicion. Hollis’s stubborn refusal to allow Mitchell to be interrogated and to limit the inquiry against him was also explicable. If Mitchell went into retirement under deep suspicion that could never be resolved, inquiry might be diverted from himself.

  The whole episode was reminiscent of Philby’s behaviour when he feared that the suspicion against Maclean might also extend to himself. He deliberately reminded his superiors of the tip given by the Russian defector Krivitsky early in 1940 that a young man ‘who had been educated at Eton and Oxford’ had been recruited ‘in the early ’30s’ and was working in the British diplomatic service. (In his book My Silent War Philby gives the impression that he was pointing a finger at Maclean to make himself appear clean. He was certainly attempting to divert suspicion away from himself but was also trying to protect Maclean. Krivitsky could not have known that Maclean was in the Foreign Service, which he did not enter until 1938, a year after the Russian had defected. Further, Maclean had not been either to Eton or Oxford. Philby’s purpose – presumably with the agreement of his Soviet controller – seems to have been to implicate other diplomats who had served in the British embassy in Washington and to direct MI5 onto time-wasting trails.

  Though the evidence against Hollis was all circumstantial, it was strong enough to induce one of the Fluency Committee members, Arthur Martin, to see Sir Dick White and say, ‘I’m sure it’s Roger!’ Martin had been firm in his mind about Hollis for many months. During the inquiries into Mitchell, he had secured a long session with Hollis, who was unusually nervous. Martin felt sure that Hollis believed he was cornered and that the rush flight to Washington, which followed soon afterward, was a symptom of his fright, as was Hollis’s gratuitous sacking of Martin from MI5.

  White was understandably appalled by Martin’s charge and in a recent letter to me has expressed his revulsion at the requirement to investigate the man he had recommended as his successor.

  The CIA and the FBI were duly informed, and soon there were few doubts in the mind of the CIA officer most experienced in counterespionage, James Jesus Angleton. On both sides of the Atlantic, a thorough backtracking investigation into Sir Roger Hollis’s past was begun. In Britain the codename for Hollis used throughout this supersensitive operation was ‘Drat’ – a typical British understatement for a situation in which the boss-man of the nation’s security service was suspected of being a Russian spy.

  CHAPTER 5

  CHINESE DAYS

  HOLLIS WAS BORN in 1905, the son of a clergyman – as was Blunt. His father later was appointed Anglican bishop of Taunton, while one of his three brothers also became a bishop. Another brother, Chri
stopher, a Catholic convert, became an MP and was an eminent writer and historian as well as a frequent contributor to humorous magazines like Punch. The third brother, Mark, was also in intelligence work, in military field security during the war, and later in Philby’s section of the secret service, as I have described.

  Roger, who was a sickly child and suffered from inferiority feelings with respect to his brothers, was educated at Clifton College in Bristol and then entered Worcester College, Oxford, in 1924. At Oxford, he joined a circle dominated by the writer and aesthete Harold Acton. His political activity seemed to be confined to membership of the New Reform Club, but he was on terms of close friendship with Claud Cockburn, a sufficiently dedicated communist to become diplomatic and foreign correspondent for the Daily Worker before and throughout the Second World War.

  Cockburn was suspected by MI5 because he published a newsletter containing such accurate intelligence that it looked as though he must have good Soviet sources. When Hollis eventually entered MI5, he never recorded that he had been close to Cockburn, as he should have done, and held Cockburn’s file in his own safe for several years.

  Hollis was also a close friend of the late Maurice Richardson, the journalist and writer who for a time joined the Communist Party. Another left-wing influence at Oxford was the extraordinary Tom Driberg, whose espionage career will astonish even his friends when I disclose its details in subsequent chapters.

  After only two years at Oxford, Hollis decided to quit and get a job because he felt he was unlikely to do well in the examinations. Originally, he and Maurice Richardson decided to leave together and go to Mexico, but Richardson backed down. Hollis therefore left on his own, determined for some unknown reason to go to China. His parents, angry at his premature departure from Oxford, refused to finance his journey, so he worked for a year in the Standard Bank in London to save enough to pay his passage to China. He seriously underestimated the costs, and by the time he reached Penang, in Malaya, he was down to £10. He succeeded in securing a job there with the British American Tobacco Company (BAT) and was eventually posted to Shanghai where, according to old colleagues who are still alive, he worked in the advertising department.