Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  "I won't," I said, "I've only got a few months to go!"

  When I saw Hanley the next morning, he went white as a sheet. He might have suspected that feelings against Wilson ran high in the office, but now he was learning that half of his staff were up to their necks in a plot to get rid of the Prime Minister. It was at times like that I was glad I never climbed the executive ladder.

  Ironically, his first reaction was anger with Maurice.

  "Bloody Maurice!" he raged. "Poking his nose into our business!"

  When he had calmed down he asked me for the names.

  I gave them. Having come so far, I could not very well refuse. As I reeled them off, I knew suddenly what Blunt had felt like. It was never easy to put on the mask and point the finger.

  "Look after them, won't you?" I asked Hanley.

  "There will have to be an inquiry, of course," he replied.

  I left before the Wilson story ended, and Hanley and I never discussed it again. I heard that a member of the Security Commission was called in to make a private inquiry for the Cabinet Office, and it has since been reported that Hanley made a number of changes, mainly in the field of recruitment, with a view to introducing new blood into MI5. This presumably explains the cryptic letter I received from Michael Hanley shortly after I retired to Australia.

  "You'll be pleased to note," he wrote, "that the firm has passed its recent examinations, and is doing rather well!"

  Shortly afterward Wilson resigned. As we always used to say in the office: "Politicians may come and go, but the Security Service goes on forever."

  The shambles surrounding Harold Wilson blew up just as the Hollis affair flickered briefly back into life in 1974. The case had remained buried since his interrogation in 1969. Originally I was hopeful that Hanley might revive things when he took over, but I could soon see that he took the view that sleeping dogs should lie. He had a deep desire to put the traumas of the past behind him, and was anxious to separate me as far as possible from current investigations and K Branch cases.

  "I've got an open mind," he used to tell me whenever I raised the question.

  Fear of scandal became the most important consideration affecting everyone with responsibility for the turmoil of the 1960s, now that there was a growing certainty that whatever the problem had been, it was at an end. I discussed with Victor whether there were any ways of reopening the case.

  "Now is not the time," he would say. "We should bide our time, and I will look for a way of raising the matter with Ted. But not now. We'll just end up jeopardizing Hanley's job. The whole thing is too potent. We must let some time go by."

  Fear of scandal reached fever pitch when, in 1975, Blunt was thought to be suffering from cancer, and likely to die. Victor approached me again, and asked me whether I thought it likely that Blunt would leave a last will and testament to be published on his death, blowing the lid off the whole affair. I had often asked Blunt about this, and he had always denied making any preparations, but there was a streak of vindictiveness in him which I never quite trusted.

  Victor knew better than any outsider just what damage Blunt could do. Both he and Heath were obsessed with the damage the Profumo scandal had done to the last Conservative Government, and were terrified that Blunt could bring them down in the same way. It was not just the problem of the immunity; there was the horrendous possibility that he might name fellow conspirators, both living and dead, as well as the chance that he might choose to leave a more intimate record of the halcyon days of the 1930s. More than a handful of reputations stood to suffer if their sexual peccadilloes from that time were circulated on Fleet Street, not least the former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.

  Victor eventually pressed me to provide him with a full brief on the damage Blunt could do if he chose to tell all. When I was in D3 I had written a variety of papers for the Home Office on the Ring of Five, but they were mostly unsatisfactory. The MI5 Legal Department insisted on removing names like Proctor and Watson on the grounds that we had no proof.

  "That's not the point," I argued. "We should be providing the Home Office with intelligence. That's our job. If we filter out things we believe to be true just because we can't prove them, we're failing in our duty."

  Victor agreed with my approach totally, and stressed that my briefing had to be as full as possible. I drew together the full history of the Ring of Five, and painstakingly showed how all the connections were made. Forty names were on the list in all. A few weeks later I saw Robert Armstrong about Agent 19. He thanked me for the document.

  "Splendid piece of work," he beamed, "real intelligence. Not like the civil servant drafts we normally get from the Security Service."

  Around this time word got back that Arthur and Stephen de Mowbray were themselves lobbying for the case against Hollis to be reopened. Arthur had retired, and Stephen de Mowbray's career was in steep decline. He had made himself deeply unpopular inside MI6 during the late 1960s by his unswerving support for Golitsin and all his theories. His mentor was Christopher Phillpotts, under whom he had served in Washington. Phillpotts brought him back to serve in Counterintelligence, but after Phillpotts retired in 1970, de Mowbray was left exposed. Dick White was determined to get rid of him if at all possible, but Maurice Oldfield suggested that a spell in Malta was the best compromise.

  When de Mowbray returned in 1972 to find that the Hollis case was shelved, he began to agitate for action. Both Oldfield and Hanley were terrified in case de Mowbray took it into his head to take his fears about Soviet penetration to an MP. Arthur, too, was developing contacts in Parliament. After retirement he went off to work there as a clerk as a way of making up his pension. There were worries in case he decided to brief one of his newfound friends on the traumas of the past twenty years.

  Hollis was not de Mowbray's only concern. He also believed that the whole system for appointing heads of the Secret Services was nepotic and potentially disastrous. He had a point, in that once a spy insinuated himself to the summit of an organization, he was in a perfect position to appoint fellow traitors to follow him.

  Oldfield raised the question of de Mowbray at one of our quiet dinners.

  "Can't you rein him in?" he asked. He made it clear that Hanley would view it favorably as well. Oldfield, too, had personal reasons for wishing to keep the Hollis affair buried. He had been passed over for the top job in MI6 when Dick White returned but was desperately hoping that he would yet get his chance as C.

  I told him that I doubted whether in the end I could have much influence over him or Arthur.

  "Yes, but they don't know what you know; they don't know how delicate things are. Any hint of scandal now could deal us all a grievous blow."

  Poor Maurice was so transparent, you could read ambition in him like a book. Before the evening was out he began to talk about the future.

  "Of course," he said, "if Rennie left, and I got the chance, I wouldn't want to stay long..."

  His voice trailed away. I knew he wanted me to pass the message along.

  A few weeks later I lunched with Stephen and tried to persuade him that now was not the time to push.

  "There are things going on," I said, "I know it looks as if it's stalled. But there are many ways of skinning a cat. We just need to give it time."

  He was not convinced. He thought I was in Hanley's pocket, and made no secret of it.

  In fact, I was still hopeful that the VENONA search authorized by Hanley might yet yield vital clues to the case. Perhaps some more traffic would be found hidden away in a dusty cupboard which would give us the matches to unlock the missing cryptonyms.

  There had recently been a small breakthrough in the existing traffic which had given cause for hope. Geoffrey Sudbury was working on part of the HASP material which had never been broken out. Advanced computer analysis revealed that this particular traffic was not genuine VENONA. It did not appear to have been enciphered using a one time pad, and from the non-random distribution of the groups, Sudbury hazarded a gue
ss that it had been enciphered using some kind of directory.

  We began the search in the British Library, and eventually found a book of trade statistics from the 1930s which fitted. Overnight a huge chunk of HASP traffic was broken. The GRU traffic was similar to much that we had already broken. But there was one series of messages which was invaluable. The messages were sent from the GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow Center, and described his meetings with the GRU spy runner Sonia, alias Ruth Kuzchinski.

  The Sonia connection had been dismissed throughout the 1960s as too tenuous to be relied upon. MI5 tended to believe the story that she came to Britain to escape Nazism and the war, and that she did not become active for Russian Intelligence until Klaus Fuchs volunteered his services in 1944. In particular GCHQ denied vehemently that Sonia could ever have been broadcasting her only radio messages from her home near Oxford during the period between 1941 and 1943

  But Kremer's messages utterly destroyed the established beliefs. They showed that Sonia had indeed been sent to the Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she was already running a string of agents. The traffic even contained the details of the payments she was making to these agents, as well as the times and durations of her own radio broadcasts. I thought bitterly of the way this new information might have influenced Hollis' interrogation had we had the material in 1969.

  Once this was known I felt more sure than ever that Elli did exist, and that he was run by Sonia from Oxford, and that the secret of his identity lay in her transmission, which inexplicably had been lost all those years before. The only hope was to travel the world and search for any sign that her traffic had been taken elsewhere.

  Over the four years from 1972 to 1976 I traveled 370,000 kilometers searching for new VENONA and Sonia's transmissions. In France, SDECE told me they had no material, even though Marcel told me he was sure they had taken it. Presumably one of the SAPPHIRE agents had long since destroyed it. In Germany they professed total ignorance. It was the same in Italy. Spain refused to entertain the request until we handed back Gibraltar. I spent months toiling around telegraph offices in Canada searching for traces of the telex links out there. But there was nothing. In Washington, extensive searches also drew a blank. It was heart-breaking to know that what I wanted had once existed, had once been filed and stored, but somehow had slipped through our fingers.

  In 1974 Hanley and I began making preparations for the next CAZAB conference, which was due to take place in London in May. I told him he would likely face pressure from the Americans and the Canadians for some kind of statement about the Hollis case. We had successfully stalled any comment since the interrogation, but Angleton for one was determined to have something on the record.

  "What shall I say?" asked Hanley.

  I told him to play things low-key.

  "Tell them the facts. There was a series of old allegations, and a number of candidates were possible starters. Hollis was one, and probably the best, but in the end, although we interrogated him, we were not able to form a firm conclusion."

  The 1974 CAZAB conference was a far cry from the high-spirited gatherings of the 1960s. Too many faces around the table had disappeared. Spry had gone; Jim Bennett from the RCMP had gone, himself a suspect in a paralyzing mole hunt inside the RCMP with which I was peripherally involved (I believe that, despite Bennett's peculiar behavior under interrogation, he was not a spy); Helms had gone; and Angleton was clearly living on borrowed time. In Washington the Watergate scandal was at its height, and already the cupboard full of CIA skeletons was inching open.

  Hanley made his short statement about the Hollis case. It was greeted silently. Most people had suffered the same traumas themselves, and knew just what pain and damage a case like that would have done. Hanley ended diplomatically by inviting the services represented to make whatever damage assessments they felt necessary in the light of his statement. It was a classic Whitehall ploy. Lay out the difficult ground, but always let the other man draw the decisive conclusion!

  I saw Angleton only once more after the CAZAB conference in Washington at the end of the year. He knew he was being forced out. A new Director, William Colby, was determined to unseat him. Angleton and Colby had quarreled about the conduct of counterintelligence in Southeast Asia for several years. When Colby became Director the opportunity to get rid of Angleton came when THE NEW YORK TIMES published a story naming Angleton as the mastermind behind a massive domestic mail surveillance program. Within a few days Angleton and all his senior men had resigned.

  When I saw Angleton he was raging.

  "Two hundred years of counterintelligence thrown away," he cursed, when he realized that the whole of his senior staff was departing. It was obvious that THE NEW YORK TIMES story was only the first shot in the war. Within six months the CIA was submerged in a welter of Senate hearings, exposes, and mire. The year when the reckoning began was 1974. In Canada and Australia inquiries began into the past iniquities, alleged or real, of their intelligence services. We were the modern pariahs - hated, distrusted, hunted.

  Oldfield and Hanley were terrified by the pace of events abroad, fearful above all that some of the revelations would spill over onto their own services. They realized, too, that the newly elected Labor Government might just be prepared to encourage such developments. It was in this context that Stephen de Mowbray finally decided that he had to act. In mid-1974 he approached a friend of his, Philip de Zuluetta, a former private secretary to Alec Douglas-Home when he was Prime Minister, and outlined his fears about the penetration of MI5, and the method of appointing service chiefs. Zuluetta suggested he approach Sir John Hunt, the new Cabinet Secretary. After telling Maurice that he could restrain himself no longer, de Mowbray made his appointment with No. 10 Downing Street.

  "What's that bloody de Mowbray doing now?" roared Hanley one morning.

  It was the first I heard of the news.

  "Bloody Maurice interfering again. How can he let one of his officers prance around to Downing Street and wash all our linen without asking me... it's intolerable!"

  I told Hanley that I felt it was inevitable. In the end de Mowbray was always determined to make an approach over the heads of MI5 and MI6, and we ought to be thankful it was to No. 10 Downing Street, rather than through a parliamentary question.

  The outcome was a review - a classic maneuver. At the time they always seem so hopeful; it is only afterward you realize they are designed to achieve the answer desired by those who set the inquiry up. This one was to be conducted by Lord Trend, the former Cabinet Secretary. He was to have all the papers, and as much time as he needed, to decide which of the two faiths was believable.

  Trend first appeared in Leconfield House in late 1974. He was given an office, a safe, and a secretary, and left alone on the fifth floor. After a few weeks he telephoned me and asked me to come to his room.

  He appeared a typical Oxford don, an aesthetic-looking man with a wide forehead and fairish gray hair.

  "I don't want to talk about the case," he began, "I simply want to get a picture of how it was all done. Then I am going to go off and study and see people, and I will see you again at the end."

  All ten volumes of the FLUENCY Working Party were stacked neatly on the desk in front of him, and for the rest of the morning we went through them.

  "How did it all begin?" he wanted to know.

  It was a question I had often asked myself as I sat in the evening poring over those same files. How did it all begin? Did it start in 1945, when Blunt left? Or did it start when Volkov and Gouzenko made their approaches? Perhaps it was much earlier, when a frail man with TB stepped off the boat from China and tried to get a job in British Intelligence. Or later, much later, when Tisler told us about the spy in MI5, or when Golitsin talked of spies, hundreds of them, thousands of them, everywhere. Or was the Mitchell case the first decisive moment, the first time we looked, and could not find the spy in our midst? How do you define the moment when a fear becomes a tangible pre
sence? It is just there. It was always there, from the beginning to the end.

  The FLUENCY files looked curiously distant. They bulged with unseen hours of work. Minutes from every secret department were carefully recorded, tracing the distribution of this document and that document. Each allegation was carefully broken down; each suspect allotted a code name. At the end of the last file was the famous minute signed in my own hand, giving the names of those who needed urgent investigation.

  On more than one occasion Trend asked about the delays in dealing with cases.

  "It's very difficult," I explained, "to be told that the man you've worked with for years, who gave you your job, or whom you gave his job, is a spy. That was what Dick White and F.J. found so difficult to come to terms with... and that's why we adopted code names from the beginning, to depersonalize everything."

  "Quite so..." said Trend.

  "You do understand that all the FLUENCY decisions were unanimous. This was not just me on my own. There were six of us, and we all thought exactly the same."