Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  When Phillpotts took over as head of Counterintelligence, I approached him as chairman of FLUENCY and asked him if he was prepared to sanction a joint MI5-MI6 investigation into Ellis to finally resolve the case. He went to Dick White, who gave his agreement, and I began working with a young MI6 Counterintelligence officer named Bunny Pancheff.

  The real difficulty in the Ellis case was trying to determine whether he was working for the Germans or the Russians, or both. Early on we got confirmation of the Abwehr officer's story, when we traced the records of the prewar operation to tap the Hitler-von Ribbentrop link. The officer in charge of processing the product was Ellis. The question was whether he was providing the information to Von Petrov in the knowledge that he was a Russian spy, or whether he assumed he was working only for the Germans.

  The first thing which convinced me Ellis was always a Russian spy was the discovery of the distribution of the Abwehr officer's report in which he claimed Von Petrov's British source was a Captain Ellis. The report was sent routinely to Kim Philby, in the Counterintelligence Department. He had scrawled in the margin: "Who is this man Ellis? NFA," meaning "No further action," before burying the report in the files. At the time Ellis' office was just a few doors down the corridor, but it seemed to me to be a most suspicious oversight by the normally eagle-eyed Philby.

  That was only the first of a number of interesting connections between Philby's career and Ellis'. Within a year of Philby's falling under suspicion Ellis took early retirement, pleading ill-health. He traveled to Australia, and took up a job as a consultant to ASIS, the Australian overseas intelligence-gathering organization. While there he was briefed by the Australians on the impending defection of Vladimir Petrov, a Beria henchman who opted to stay in the West rather than take his chances in Moscow. Almost immediately Ellis returned to Britain and contacted Kim Philby, despite being specifically warned against doing so by Maurice Oldfield. No one knows what they discussed, but from that date onward Petrov fell under suspicion in Australia, and when he noticed his safe had been tampered with in the Soviet Embassy, he defected earlier than anticipated, eluding by hours two burly KGB officers who had been sent out from Moscow to bring him back. The reasons for Ellis' hasty flight from Australia have never been clear, but I have always assumed that he thought the Petrov who was about to defect was the same Von Petrov with whom he had been involved in the 1920s, and who must have known the secret of his treachery.

  We looked at his wartime record. He spent most of the war in the USA working as deputy to Sir William Stephenson, the Man Called Intrepid, at British Security Coordination. Some of the American VENONA showed clearly that the Soviets were operating a number of agents inside BSC, but although we tried exhaustive analysis to link Ellis with each of the cryptonyms, we could never be certain.

  I began to search further back for more definite clues connecting Ellis to the Soviets in the prewar period. At the time I was studying the prewar period as part of the D3 researches, and was rereading Elizabeth Poretsky's autobiography, OUR OWN PEOPLE, about her life as the wife of Ludwik Poretsky (also known as Ignace Reiss), one of the "great illegals" who worked along with Krivitsky as a Fourth Department agent runner for the Soviet GRU. He was murdered after he refused to return to Moscow and defected. I first read the book in its English translation, but this time I studied the original French text, titled LES NOTRES. I seized on an extraordinary statement which had not appeared in the English edition. Elizabeth Poretsky said that in the late 1920s Ludwik had an agent high up in British Intelligence.

  In 1966 I traveled to Paris to see Mrs Poretsky, a shrew who guarded her husband's memory jealously and remained suspicious of all agents of Western imperialism. I talked around the subject for a while, and then reminded her of the passage in the book. Surely, I ventured, she had got her dates wrong, and presumably this agent was Philby? She became quite indignant, squawking at me for my ignorance.

  "This was not Philby," she jabbered. "Ludwik ran this agent in Amsterdam in 1928 and 1929. Philby was just a schoolboy then."

  "Do you think you could recognize the man?" I asked, trying hard to conceal my excitement.

  She began to hedge. She told me she was still loyal to LES NOTRES. She could never inform.

  "Oh no," I told her, "it's nothing like that - we just need it for our records."

  I produced a spread of twenty photographs from my briefcase. Some were dummy photographs, others were of known colleagues of her husband, and one was of Ellis, dating from the mid-1920s. She picked out all those she ought to have known, and Ellis as well.

  "I do not know this man's name," she told me, "but I am sure he is familiar."

  From Paris I traveled by bus to Amsterdam to see a woman named Mrs. Pieck, the widow of a Dutchman, Henri Pieck, who worked as a Soviet illegal and recruited several spies in Britain during the prewar period, including John Herbert King, a cipher clerk in the Foreign Office. Elizabeth Poretsky had suggested I visit Mrs. Pieck in case she could throw any light on the photograph she had picked out. Mrs. Pieck was a woman from the same mold, and had clearly been warned of my imminent arrival. She too picked out Ellis' photograph, but refused to say why.

  There was only one other lead. Elizabeth Poretsky told in her book how Richard Sorge, the great Soviet illegal who eventually built up one of the most important spy networks in history in China and Japan during World War II, had traveled to Britain during the late 1920s. His mission had been highly dangerous, but she told me she knew no more details, and tried too obviously to dissuade me from visiting Sorge's widow, Christiane, who was living in a seminary near New York. I cabled Stephen de Mowbray, then based in Washington as an MI6 liaison officer, and asked him to visit her.

  Christiane Sorge placed the final piece in the jigsaw, but left the picture still infuriatingly unfocused. She did indeed remember Sorge's mission, and said it was to see a very important agent, although she knew nothing of his identity. She recalled just one fragment - a meeting on a street corner in London. She and Rickie had gone together to meet this agent, but he had told her to stand well back and cover him in case there was trouble. Could she recognize the man? Stephen asked her. She had seen him, but not well. He showed her the photographs.

  "This man looks familiar," she said, "but I could not be certain, after over forty years."

  It was Ellis' photograph.

  Eventually Ellis was interrogated. He was old, and claimed to be in ill-health, so Bunny Pancheff and I were instructed to take the sessions extremely gently. Ellis denied everything for several days. He blustered and blamed the whole thing on jealous colleagues. But as we produced the evidence, the Abwehr officer's report, and the indoctrination list for the telephone tap, he began to wilt.

  After lunch on the Friday he returned to the interrogation room in the basement of the old War Office, known as Room 055, with a typed sheet of paper. It was a confession of sorts. He claimed that he had got into trouble during the early years in MI6. He was sent out into the field with no training and no money, and began providing chicken feed, odd scraps of information about MI6 plans, to his agent Zilenski (his brother-in-law), who was in touch with Von Petrov, in order to obtain more intelligence in return. It was a dangerous game, and soon he was being blackmailed. He claimed that his wife was ill, and he needed money, so he agreed to supply Zilenski with more information.

  Ellis' confession was carefully shaded at the edges to hide precisely what intelligence he had given, and where it had gone, so, under interrogation, we asked him to clarify it. He admitted passing over detailed order-of-battle plans for British Intelligence, as well as betraying the Hitler-von Ribbentrop telephone link, even though he knew this material was being passed by Von Petrov to the Germans. (Part of the Abwehr information came from Stevens and Best, who were captured by a trick on the Dutch-German border by the Gestapo. We were able to talk to them after the war, and they said that at their interrogation they were amazed how much the Abwehr knew about the organization of MI6. We asked E
llis when he last had contact with the Russian emigre's. He admitted that it was in December 1939, after the outbreak of war.

  Ellis was a venal, sly man. He sat there, stripped of his rank, white-faced and puffy. But never once did I hear an apology. I could understand how a man might choose the Soviets through ideological conviction. But to sell colleagues out to the Germans for a few pounds in time of war? I told him that had he been caught in 1939-40 he would have been hanged.

  Ellis clearly thought the interrogation was over. But it had just begun. We wanted to know about his involvement with the Soviets, we said. For a moment he wavered in front of us, then he fought back.

  "Never!" he shouted, "never with the Communists..."

  The next day we took him through the odd chain of events - his trip to Australia, and his rapid return to Britain, and the coincidence of Petrov's defection. But he denied everything, even when he was caught out in repeated lying about his actions until he retired. Not even an authorized offer of immunity could make him change his mind. But I have little doubt of Ellis' involvement with the Russians.

  Bunny Pancheff and I wrote the case up, and concluded that in our opinion Ellis had certainly committed espionage for the Germans, including during the war, and that we believed him also to have been a long-term agent of the Russian Intelligence Service until his removal from secret access. The report was endorsed without reservation by Christopher Phillpotts, and submitted to Dick White and his deputy, Maurice Oldfield.

  Oldfield was a shy and good man, with a wonderful grasp of the principles of counterintelligence. But he was a poor judge of character. At first he doubted the veracity of Ellis' confession, until eventually Bunny Pancheff played the crucial exchanges to him. But even though we had uncovered a traitor of major proportions, I sometimes felt as if it were I who was being blamed. Oldfield despised the climate of fear engendered by Phillpotts' vetting purges, and campaigned hard to change Dick's mind. The fact that Ellis had confessed seemed to weigh hardly at all on his thinking. As far as he was concerned, it was all a long time ago, and best forgotten.

  As the climate against investigations turned in the late 1960s, I wanted desperately to have some of the FLUENCY conclusions circulated more widely inside both Services. I felt sure that this was the only way we could restore some general consent for a continuation of the work. At the moment, people knew nothing of the cases, and to them our activities seemed like blind McCarthyism. D3 had become such a massive section, embracing FLUENCY and the D3 researches into the 1930s. Inevitably, other senior officers resented its priority call on resources and personnel, and since they had no way of judging the importance of the work we were conducting, their resentments grew. I was accused of being suspicious of everybody. F.J. would defend me if the attacks were public. On one occasion he turned around and said to my attacker, "It is Peter's job to be suspicious." Like Angleton, I could sense my enemies multiplying. It was a curious sensation. After years of being the hunter, I suddenly felt myself hunted.

  Matters came to a head in 1969 at the annual conference attended by senior MI5 officers at the Sunningdale Civil Service College in Berkshire. A number of officers launched bitter attacks on me, and others involved in D1 (Investigations), as well as on the work we were doing. What had D3 ever achieved? they asked. They talked of the bonds of trust between fellow officers ruptured by the climate of suspicion. Innocent men suffering, they said.

  "Which innocent men?" I said. "That's a lie. Who? You name them!"

  My hands were tied - I could not talk in specifics or generalities, and was forced to defend myself by stressing that every move we made in relation to a case was endorsed by F.J. personally. But without my explaining to them the long history of the search for penetration, they could not possibly understand.

  Afterward I appealed to F.J. to publish a paper on the FLUENCY assessments. I outlined the sort of thing we could circulate to the top seventy officers: a resume of the continuous allegations of penetration since the war, including the attributions to the known spies wherever possible, and indicating the large number of still unexplained allegations. F.J. refused even to consider it.

  "If I do this, Peter," he said, "it will break the heart of the Service. We would never recover."

  "But these people don't even know Blunt was a spy. How can they possibly sympathize and support our work, if they aren't told something?"

  "In my view," he said, "it would be better if no one knew, ever!"

  "But how can we go on?" I asked him. "We've got young people coming into the Service every year. They listen to the tapes, they read the office histories, and they learn nothing about this, and it's the most important subject there is. How can you expect them to live a lie? You might as well not have done any of this work, unless you face up to it, and show people we have by explaining to them how it all happened, and say to people, 'Look, there are these gaps, and that's why we've got to carry on.' "

  F.J. would have none of it. There were moments, not many it is true, but this was one, when he was immutable.

  "What about me?" I asked finally. "How do I go on in the office, facing this level of hostility?"

  He suddenly became steely.

  ''That is a price you have to pay for sitting in judgment on people."

  In 1968, following his clearance, Michael Hanley was appointed head of Counterespionage. Ever since the traumatic events of the previous year Hanley and I had barely spoken. He had never said anything, but I could tell he blamed me for the decision to investigate him. When he took over he lost no time in trying to clip my wings. At first it was public slap-downs.

  "Oh, Peter," he would say mockingly, "that's just another one of your mad theories."

  But then his assault became more serious. He began to remove staff and resources from D3 wherever possible. At first I fought my corner, and went to F.J. to get them reinstated, but after a while I began to wonder whether it was worth the fight. The D3 research task was nearing completion. Only the high-level penetration issue remained unsolved, and that had been shelved for more than three years, with little sign that it would ever be revived. The constant strain of the work was taking its toll on my health. My thoughts turned toward retirement and to my first love - farming.

  I decided that at least I should confront Hanley personally before giving up. I went to see him and asked him point-blank why he was trying to drive me out of the Service. He claimed there was no persecution. It was just that D3 had got too big, and there were increasing complaints that some of its less glamorous, but no less important tasks, like security assessments for ministers and the like, were being neglected.

  "Well, give me an officer to look after the paperwork, then," I countered.

  But Hanley refused.

  "I know I'm a poor administrator," I admitted, "but are you sure the real reason for this isn't because you bear a grudge against this type of work?"

  Hanley became red-faced. He knew what I was driving at, but denied his own experience was coloring his judgment.

  "I suppose you know it was me?" I said. "Have you ever seen the file?"

  The ice was broken. I went back to my office and pulled out the file on the HARRIET investigation. I showed Hanley everything - the way the search for the middling-grade agent arose from the FLUENCY report, the shelving of the hunt for the high-level spy, the D3 inquiries, the Watson and Proctor cases, the investigations, the visit to his psychiatrist.

  "I never realized," he said, as he studied the files.

  "We're the people who were asked to do the dirty work," I told him bitterly," and now when we've done most of the work, they want to brush it under the carpet and forget us, and forget the things we did."

  Indoctrination into the burden of terrible secrets which so few have shouldered had a profound effect on Hanley. He realized that he had no experience of any of this, and his only knowledge of D Branch was from his time on the Polish desk in the 1950s. In order to make a success of D Branch he had to have guidance. One day he
called me into his office and explained his problem. He was quite straightforward, and I respected him for it. He still wanted to break down D3. Its mammoth task was almost finished, he told me, and in any case, he wanted me to become his personal consultant on the whole reorganization of D Branch which he was planning. I was to have sight of every paper, and access to all cases in the Branch with the brief to guide him with my intimate knowledge of the previous fifteen years. Unlike any other officer, I had never moved from D Branch. As Dick White promised at my interview, I received no promotion, but then I was not forced to play musical chairs, switching from department to department every second year. D Branch had been my life. I knew every case and file. It was a fair offer, and I accepted immediately.

  But that still left the problem of penetration.

  "Who is going to continue that work? We can't let the thing slip again, otherwise another backlog of unresolved cases will build up," I said.

  I had been convinced for more than a year that we needed some formal mechanism for looking at the whole question of internal penetration. The problem of the 1960s was that there was no department in the Service where allegations of penetration could be investigated. Everything was ad hoc. FLUENCY had no formal status, it was just a working party. The work did not sit easily inside D1 (Investigations), because their correct job was to investigate penetrations that occurred outside the Service. It was precisely this lack of a mechanism which contributed to the accusations of "the Gestapo" in the office. We were seen to be people pursuing investigations outside the normal channels, and in an organization as conscious of hierarchy as MI5, that was a considerable problem. With a proper section devoted to the work, the Service would be able to see that the management had given its full backing. It would, in other words, have legitimacy.