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

by Chapman Pincher

The Trend Report was so secret that very few knew of its existence. Six years later, however, following the publication of this book, it gave Mrs Thatcher the opportunity to give Parliament and the public the impression that Hollis had been ‘cleared’ not only by Trend but previously by his colleagues, though she was at pains to point out that his innocence could not be proved. The Times put the situation more accurately. ‘Mrs Thatcher has now officially revealed that there were serious professional suspicions about Sir Roger Hollis which do not seem to have been dispelled but merely disposed of, as it were, by majority verdict.’

  Mrs Thatcher’s statement was based on a brief supplied by the Cabinet Office in conjunction with MI5. There was an essential item in it that made no sense either to the security officers who had given evidence to Trend or to me. She said,

  The case for investigating Sir Roger Hollis was based on certain leads that suggested, but did not prove, that there had been a Russian intelligence service agent at a relatively high level in British counter-intelligence in the last years of the war. None of these leads identified Sir Roger or pointed specifically or wholly in his direction. Each of them could also be taken as pointing to Philby or Blunt.

  Blunt left MI5 in 1945 and had no further access to secret information. Philby left the secret service in 1951 and had no further access to secret information. Yet readers of this book will appreciate that several of the leads that made the Fluency Committee suspicious of Hollis occurred long after those dates. In fact, it was the singular lack of success in MI5 after 1951 that led to the setting up of the Fluency Committee. For some of the members of that committee, the ‘moment of truth’ regarding Hollis centred on the suspicious circumstances of Philby’s defection in 1963. Hollis’s strange behaviour over Mitchell and Blunt followed in that year and in 1964.

  I have been assured by people who must know but are anxious not to be identified that Lord Trend did not limit himself to a consideration of the evidence relating to the war years but studied the whole of it up to and including the interrogation of Hollis in 1970. So either Mrs Thatcher was misinformed in the brief provided for her by officials or the statement prepared for her was selective in its references to the Trend Report to provide a political opportunity for an assertion that all the evidence was almost forty years old.

  A letter from Lord Trend to me dated 12 August 1981 makes it clear that he declines to be associated with the suggestion that the leads could each be attributed either to Philby or Blunt.

  James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher’s predecessor as Prime Minister, seemed to be more straightforward when, during the parliamentary debate on the Blunt case, he said, ‘Blunt is merely one part of a highly complicated case that the security service has spent many years and many man-hours seeking to unravel to find the truth … I do not think that the matter will ever be cleared up.’

  He had read the Trend Report but could not have been entirely satisfied by it.

  I am convinced that there is no legal evidence admissible in a British court that could be brought against Hollis, were he still alive. But the mass of circumstantial evidence remains and is not really attributable to Blunt, Philby or anyone else who is known.

  In a television interview, Sir Harold Wilson, who had reread the Trend Report a few days beforehand, confirmed that there had been serious leakages from MI5 and that some of them could have originated from Hollis.

  The Hollis affair remains of importance and interest to the United States, and for that reason, as well as others, this book was discussed by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Malcolm Wallop, within two days of its publication.

  As many American readers will be aware, certain former members of the CIA, and James Angleton in particular, had cause to suspect that the CIA had been penetrated at a relatively high level by a KGB ‘mole’. No such ‘mole’ has ever been identified. So when I learned the full extent of the evidence against Hollis, circumstantial though it might be, I wrote to Angleton suggesting that the mole might never have been in the CIA but in MI5, which had access to much of the American information believed to have been leaked. He declined to comment, but I think the suggestion is worthy of serious analysis, for most of the important leakages seem to have occurred during the time that Hollis was in MI5 and to have ceased after 1965, when he retired. It may also be significant that the leakages from MI5 seem to have ended after that date.

  • • •

  Following the Trend inquiry, improvements in the selection of the directors general and in the recruitment of new members to both MI5 and the secret service have been introduced. A Committee of Five, including the chief of the defence staff, now makes the recommendation to the Prime Minister for the appointment of new directors general. The Prime Minister, particularly so in the case of Mrs Thatcher, is in regular touch with the heads of MI5 and the secret service. The days when a director general could studiously avoid contact with his political masters, as Hollis did, are over. Positive vetting of members of the security services is now more stringent and more regular. Internal checks against foreign penetration have been built into both services.

  An effective test of whether high-level penetration of MI5 had ceased with the departure of Hollis was provided in the autumn of 1971 by the defection in London of a KGB officer, Oleg Lyalin. It was following this defection that the government, then headed by Edward Heath, expelled 105 Soviet intelligence agents, who had been posing as diplomats and trade officials, though this number was less than half the total known to be in Britain for subversive purposes.

  What has not been known is that Lyalin had been recruited by British intelligence six months prior to his defection, which took place when it did only because he was stupidly involved in a drunken driving incident and was arrested by the police. Lyalin had been due to return to Russia, and the intelligence authorities had hoped that he would continue to supply information there, but, following his drunken behaviour, his expulsion from the KGB was almost certain.

  Nevertheless, that the Russians had not learned that Lyalin was spying for Britain was excellent evidence that no high-level Soviet agents existed inside MI5. Sir Martin Furnival Jones had insisted that only about ten people in MI5 who needed to know about Lyalin should be told, and nobody outside, in the civil service, Foreign Office or government, was informed. There is no doubt that the Russians would quickly have withdrawn or liquidated Lyalin had they known of his treachery if only because he knew the names of so many other Soviet agents. Indeed, after his defection, he was regarded as such a likely target for assassination that his trial on the driving charge was quashed, and he underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance.

  The success of the massive security and intelligence operation preceding the expulsions provided further evidence that both MI5 and the secret service were ‘clean’, at least in the upper levels. The director general of MI5, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, expected that the Soviet ambassador would demand to know the reasons for at least some of the expulsions, and he had detailed evidence ready against every one of the 105. The Russian ambassador made no such demand, and it was clear that he and the KGB had been taken totally by surprise. It was the view inside MI5 that such a welcome situation would not have been possible a few years earlier.

  In 1974, the British security services had a major triumph, which could never have been possible had there been a spy at the top in either of the organisations. They provided the lead resulting in the arrest of Guenter Guillaume, the personal assistant to Willi Brandt, then West German Chancellor. It was proved that he was a Soviet bloc agent and former officer of the East German Army, infiltrated into West Germany in the monstrously deceptive guise, so favoured by the KGB, of a political refugee seeking asylum. Given every opportunity to make a new life, he insinuated himself into Brandt’s entourage with such success that, when the full extent of his treachery was appreciated, a senior British official at NATO military headquarters exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s all gone!’ Given the slightest whiff of suspic
ion against such a valuable agent, whose detection was eventually to end Brandt’s political career, the Russians would have found some way of withdrawing him.

  Not long after his final interrogation, Sir Roger Hollis suffered a stroke but virtually recovered from it. In 1973, however, he had a further stroke that killed him at the age of sixty-seven.

  His brief obituary notice in The Times was composed by his old colleague, Sir Dick White, who, in line of duty, had been so deeply involved in the investigations into the Soviet penetration of MI5. However impressive the evidence may seem, the mind of the ordinary citizen boggles at the idea of a chief of the British security service sidling off at intervals to contact some Soviet controller and receive his next instructions. But that is exactly what Blunt and Philby did for many years without detection. And, as the next section will show, there were others in similar positions.

  CHAPTER 11

  PROFESSOR OF THE ARTS — OF TREACHERY

  ANTHONY BLUNT, THE communist traitor who eventually became surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, was one of the most damaging spies ever to operate in Britain, contrary to the common belief that, compared with Philby or Maclean, he was in the second division.

  His crimes against his country, dragged out of him during hundreds of hours of taped interrogations, are such an indictment of wartime security that every effort has been made to cover them from public knowledge. Before he gave his public interviews to The Times and on television, this man, who had given the Russians every official secret that came his way, had been advised to use the Official Secrets Act as a means of refusing to give answers that were no longer of any security value but would have pointed to the full extent of his treachery.

  The information courageously given to Parliament by Mrs Thatcher was carefully drafted from a brief supplied by MI5 to minimise the public outrage. Mrs Thatcher was advised to say that the government did not know exactly what information Blunt had passed to the Russians. The catch, for which the Prime Minister was not responsible, was in the word ‘exactly’. The details that the security authorities could have told the government from Blunt’s confessions – as the reader will be able to judge for himself – were enough to have hanged him a hundred times over, had his treachery been discovered during the war.

  After long and difficult research, I have been able to piece together the major parts of Blunt’s confessions and the precise, and cowardly, reason why he made them. I shall deal with this reason at some length later but can satisfy the reader’s curiosity at this point by outlining the crucial event.

  Late in 1963, a middle-aged American, Michael Whitney Straight, belonging to the rich and famous family, was invited to undertake a task by the White House. Having a guilt complex about his secret past, he went to FBI headquarters in Washington to clear himself on security grounds after first deciding that he would not take the post. There he confessed that he had been a communist while in England at Cambridge University, had been recruited to the Soviet interest and had been in touch with a Soviet intelligence officer for several years. He named the man who had recruited him as Sir Anthony Blunt, whom he knew to have been an active Soviet spy. He said that he was prepared to give evidence in court against Blunt if necessary.

  The FBI passed this information to MI5, and it was only when confronted by it in April 1964 that Blunt decided to confess, after first being assured that he would never face prosecution. Blunt has said publicly that he felt free to confess because something that happened in 1964 ‘freed him from loyalty to his friends’. The sanctimonious hypocrite confessed because, for the first time in his treacherous life, he was frightened.

  I have also been able to compile a list of those named by Blunt as fellow traitors and of others to whom he gave leads, sometimes unwittingly, together with the treasonable acts they are known to have committed or of which they are suspected. They include otherwise distinguished men and women, some now dead.

  In the course of these inquiries, I have uncovered many intriguing new facts about Blunt’s co-conspirators, Burgess, Maclean, Philby and the probable Fifth Man of what the KGB called the Ring of Five. This man, discovered by an unwitting lead from Blunt, has not been heard of in the context of being a Soviet agent.

  Here, then, is the true, unexpurgated story of the double life and the sordid times of Anthony Blunt, art expert, one-time knight and long-term KGB spy.

  The son of a London vicar, Anthony Blunt entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926 at the age of eighteen to study French and English and also to pursue his interest in the history of art. By the time he was twenty-five, he appeared to be so talented that he was made a fellow of his college and taken on the teaching staff. In the early ’30s, Marxism became the rage among Cambridge intellectuals, and Blunt was soon attracted by its deceptively logical answers to society’s injustices and economic problems.

  Blunt was also attracted to another Marxist and communist, Guy Burgess, a former Etonian who arrived at Trinity in 1930. Both were homosexuals and Blunt found Burgess a most entertaining companion intellectually. They were fellow members of the exclusive group known as The Apostles, whose major topic of conversation was communism and its merits.

  Conversion to communism and active membership of the Communist Party were being openly encouraged by certain dons, like Maurice Dobb. So the very promising situation was sized up by professional intelligence officers of the Soviet Union on the lookout for talented young men likely to achieve positions of trust, where they could eventually serve as valuable spies and agents of subversion. Burgess was among the earliest to be actively recruited to the cause of what is now called the KGB. He became the second member of what was to become the Ring of Five, having been recruited by Philby, who was the first. Burgess’s immediate task was to recruit others, and among those he successfully hooked into the Russian cause was Blunt.

  In the course of his interrogation, Blunt described just how Burgess had gone about the recruitment: ‘Anthony, we must do something to counter the horrors of Nazism. We can’t just sit here and talk about it. The government is pacifying Hitler, so Marxism is the only solution. I am already committed to work secretly for peace. Are you prepared to help me?’

  Even in those days, the communists had latched on to the word ‘peace’ as a euphemism for subversion, and the work was always for the Comintern. Founded in 1919, the Comintern was supposed to be an international communist organisation for securing world revolution, but it had been quickly taken over by the Kremlin as an instrument for promoting Soviet expansionist policies.

  Blunt, who had been trained to become a recruiter himself, then described how it was customary to point out that the work would be undercover and dangerous – a deliberately exciting appeal to young men and women. It was only later that the recruits found that they were committed to work for Russian intelligence, usually for life, and at any sacrifice to their careers and private lives.

  As Alexander Foote, who was recruited when young, recorded,

  The loyalty of a party member lies primarily with the party and secondarily with his country. As a result he is prepared to take enormous risks, work long hours: for little pay, and live, if necessary die, for the ideals of the party, which means, in effect, for Moscow. It is from this overriding loyalty to party rather than to patriotism that the Russian spy system derives its strength.

  After agreeing to help, Blunt had been introduced without further delay to his controller, the Soviet agent who would meet him regularly, give him his instructions, receive any information he might secure and ensure that he remained active in the Kremlin’s interest. One of the controller’s first acts was, almost invariably, to offer a small payment of money – ‘Just for your expenses, of course.’ Having signed a receipt, the recruit was then firmly hooked, especially as he was also required to pass over as much information as possible in his own handwriting.

  Blunt was the third member of the Ring of Five, as Moscow called the five young Cambridge men recruited as spies and all known
to each other as such. Burgess and Philby were the first two, and Maclean was the fourth. Blunt still insists that he never knew the identity of the Fifth Man, though, having eventually been confronted with MI5’s candidate for that doubtful distinction, as I shall describe, he agreed that one of his former close friends at Cambridge fitted the bill.

  When the Ring consisted only of Burgess and Philby, its controller had been a foreigner known to them only as ‘Theo’. He has since been identified as Theodore Maly, a tall, rather handsome Hungarian who had been a priest but had become an atheist and a communist while serving as a chaplain in the First World War. He had joined the Soviet intelligence service and become a Soviet citizen.

  ‘Theo’ was an ‘illegal’, meaning a Soviet secret agent with a false passport, who operated alone under some cover, rarely, if ever, contacting the Russian embassy, where spies posing as diplomats had diplomatic immunity and were therefore known in the KGB as ‘legals’. This use of ‘illegals’ as controllers dated from 1927 when a raid by Special Branch police on the offices of ARCOS, the All Russian Cooperative Society, in the City of London, proved that the Russians posing as trade officials were really spies and saboteurs.

  Blunt never met ‘Theo’ because, by the time he had been recruited in 1935, ‘Theo’ had been switched to Paris and been replaced by another man called ‘Otto’, described by Blunt as being ‘short, with no neck and swept-back, straight hair.’ ‘Otto’, a Czech who has never been satisfactorily identified, disappeared in 1938, and Blunt told his interrogators that, for some reason, all the ‘illegals’ operating in Europe had been recalled to Russia on Stalin’s orders and are believed to have been liquidated in the great purge, along with thousands of Red Army officers. It is certain that ‘Theo’ met his death that way, returning to Moscow knowing that he would be shot. Another agent, Otto Katz – who could not have been ‘Otto’ – was also murdered by his employers. A few who declined to return were eventually hunted down and assassinated.